Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Recent Presidential Elections -- 2012 Election -- Why Obama Won

The Republican base saw the president as weak and beatable, but Mitt Romney’s high command struggled to find a winning message.


The bottom line is that the Obama campaign [had] a candidate that was very hard to lay a glove on because he was somebody that the American people, by and large, had decided that they just liked,” said Romney’s deputy campaign manager Katie Packer Gage.


...


It was one of the most frustrating things in our campaign,” Gage added. “In focus group after focus group, when you would sit down with this sort of narrow slice of voters — undecided female voters who had voted for Barack Obama in 2008 — they weren’t ready to vote for Barack Obama yet, but when we would test message point after message point after message point, there was almost nothing that would stick to this guy because they just liked him personally” (Hohmann 1).


On paper, Democrats' turnout efforts this year dwarfed those of their GOP counterparts. The 125 million voter contacts the Obama team claimed were more than twice the Republican total. The hundreds of Democratic field offices outnumbered GOP outposts by greater than 2-1 or 3-1 in key swing states.


But the Obama campaign insisted it wasn't just about the numbers.

"Many field campaigns have historically favored quantity over quality. We do not," Obama national field director Jeremy Bird told reporters just before Election Day. "These are not phone calls made from a call center. They are done at the local level by our neighborhood team leaders, members and volunteers, who are talking to people in their communities."

And in an election cycle where billions of dollars were spent on attack ads -- far more than ever before -- that kind of old-school retail politicking may have made the difference.

In the home stretch, the Romney campaign pointed to a big jump in voter contacts this year over John McCain's 2008 effort. But a significant percentage of the voter contacts they pointed to included indirect contact -- like door hangers -- that didn't give voters the all-important sense of personal connection.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign's turnout effort flooded the zone. While Republicans were still battling for the nomination in the spring, the number of Obama field offices in key primary season states likely to play significant roles in the fall -- states like Ohio, New Hampshire and Florida -- already outnumbered those of all his potential GOP challengers combined, even though the president wasn't facing any primary season challengers.

Record-breaking numbers of voters cast their ballots before Election Day this year -- half the voting population or higher in some states -- and the Obama campaign was able to bank huge leads weeks ahead of the race's final day.

these Obama outposts, no matter how small, weren't just window dressing; they filled a couple of key functions. Since each was staffed with at least one Obama for America staffer, they served as an initial point of contact with the campaign, and a recruitment center for local volunteers. They provided a central location for campaign events, for phone banking and for data collection. And their permanence allowed the campaign to develop vital local insight: to build detailed voter files on potential supporters, field test the best ways to motivate them, and push them to cast their votes weeks before Election Day.

Republicans said those early voting efforts by the president's campaign were just tapping out their support from voters who would have shown up for him in the end anyway -- and that the edge fueled by early voting would evaporate when Republican voters headed to the polls on Election Day. They weren't entirely wrong; a good chunk of those early Democratic votes came from banking ballots from the president's strongest supporters, base voters who would have shown up no matter what.

But that early vote cushion wasn't just cosmetic. It helped create an aura of inevitability on the ground in key swing states. It provided an insurance policy against potential vote loss to Election Day lines and snafus. And instead of devoting valuable home stretch resources to bringing guaranteed votes to the polls on Election Day, the campaign could instead focus on using those hard-core supporters as Election Day foot soldiers, employing the most personal and effective form of voter persuasion to bring less enthusiastic backers to the polls (Sinderbrand 1-3).

The Democrats’ position on … domestic issues and the improving economy convinced independent voters—better than one-third of the electorate—that President Obama deserved re-election. Mitt Romney’s gaffes during the campaign, particularly his “private” remark writing off 47 percent of the electorate as dependent on government programs, enabled Democrats to frame Republicans as out of touch with ordinary Americans.

Romney simply did not resonate well with the majority of voters. Polls indicated that Americans “liked” Obama, even though some disagreed with his policies. Personality and perceptions play a significant role in campaigns. But it is important to understand that a candidate’s stance on the issues help to create positive or negative images. So elections are not simply about personalities, but also reflect the effectiveness of getting across a positive message to voters (Goldfields 14).

a reconstruction by the [Boston] Globe of how the campaign unfolded shows that Romney’s problems went deeper than is widely understood. His campaign made a series of costly financial, strategic, and political mistakes that, in retrospect, all but assured the candidate’s defeat, given the revolutionary turnout tactics and tactical smarts of President Obama’s operation.

One of the gravest errors, many say, was the Romney team’s failure, until too late in the campaign, to sell voters on the candidate’s personal qualities and leadership gifts. The effect was to open the way for Obama to define Romney through an early blitz of negative advertising. Election Day polls showed that the vast majority of voters concluded that Romney did not really care about average people.

Rich Beeson, the Romney political director …, said that only after the election did he realize what Obama was doing with so much manpower on the ground. Obama had more than 3,000 paid workers nationwide, compared with 500 for Romney, and hundreds of thousands of volunteers.

Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and offices,’’ Beeson said. “They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,’’ something that Romney did not have the staff to match.


Republicans, as it happened, had lost track of their own winning formula.


Democrats said they followed the trail blazed in 2004 by the Bush campaign which used an array of databases to “microtarget’’ voters and a sophisticated field organization to turn them out. Obama won in part by updating the GOP’s innovation.


Romney’s inner circle of family and friends understood the candidate’s weakness all too well: He was a deeply private person, with an aversion to revealing too much of himself to the public. They worried that unless the candidate opened up, he would too easily be reduced to caricature, as a calculating man of astounding wealth, a man unable to relate to average folks, a man whose Mormon faith put him outside the mainstream.


Romney’s eldest son, Tagg, drew up a list of 12 people whose lives had been helped by his father in ways that were publicly unknown but had been deeply personal and significant, such as assisting a dying teenager in writing a will or quietly helping families in financial need. Such compelling vignettes would have been welcome material in almost any other campaign. But Romney’s strategists worried that stressing his personal side would backfire, and a rift opened between some in Romney’s circle and his strategists that lasted until the convention. More than being reticent, Romney was at first far from sold on a second presidential run. Haunted by his 2008 loss, he initially told his family he would not do it. While candidates often try to portray themselves as reluctant, Tagg insisted his father’s stance was genuine.


He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to ... run,’’ said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place ... he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.’’



Family members kept pushing for a film or series of advertisements that would show how Romney had helped average people in personal ways, based on Tagg’s list of 12 people, along with clips about how Romney raised his family. The film project was to be overseen by documentary filmmaker Greg Whiteley, a longtime family friend who had been allowed to film portions of Romney’s 2008 campaign. But the plan was rejected, leading some in the family to blame [Stuart] Stevens, [Romney’s chief strategist].


Stevens said he did not kill the documentary. But he said he did have a strategic vision that went another way, one he grounded in four questions he put to voters in focus groups.


There [were] different areas that you could go into,’’ Stevens said. “Talk about Mitt’s business record, Mitt‘s personal story, what Mitt would do as president ... and why Barack Obama is bad. We tested all four equally. We were open to doing any combination, and the one that tested far and away the best, people wanted to know what Mitt Romney would do as president.’’


President Obama’s strategy had very different roots.

His national field director, Jeremy Bird, … was confident that Obama would commit massive resources to building an organization that zeroed in on individual voters.



Bird and his colleagues drew up plans to expand the electorate into one that could reelect Obama. In Ohio, for example, a “barber shop and beauty salon’’ strategy was designed to get likely Obama supporters, particularly African-Americans, to register to vote when they went for a haircut. “Faith captains’’ were assigned to churches to encourage parishioners to turn out for Obama. “Condo captains’’ were told to know every potential Obama voter in their building. The goal was like nothing seen in presidential politics: Each Obama worker would be responsible for about 50 voters in key precincts over the course of the campaign. By Election Day, that worker would know much about the lives of those 50 voters, including whether they had made it to the polls. Romney’s team talked about a ratio of thousands of voters per worker. It would prove to be a crucial difference.


A first-class ground operation in 2012 required leading-edge technology, and here also an early gap opened between Obama and Romney.


The goal was to create the political equivalent of a Facebook or Twitter, a platform that would change the way presidential campaigns are run. And Obama’s team found just the man for the job: a 34-year-old programming whiz named Harper Reed, who got his start as an 11-year-old pecking on an Apple II and had never held a top job in a political campaign. With his wildly flowing black hair, big earrings, and bigger glasses, he was not long on humility — his website proclaimed that “I am pretty awesome’’ — but his talents were real.


As Reed assembled his team, he insisted on being given leeway to hire some of the best techies in the country, from Facebook, Craigslist, Twitter. Moreover, he insisted the team be largely internal, rather than have the enterprise be divided up among outside consultants.

The group was haunted by the failure of a similar venture in Obama’s 2008 campaign, when a get-out-the-vote computer program called Houdini crashed and could have cost the election if the race had been closer. This time, Reed and his team created a successor that they named Gordon, after the person who punched Houdini in the stomach shortly before the magician died.


Separately, the Obama team created a system called Narwahl, named after an Arctic whale, which linked disparate computer programs together. Narwahl and Gordon would be tested repeatedly in exercises that Obama’s team called “game day.’’ Every imaginable failure would be thrown at the systems — hacker attacks, database meltdowns, Internet failures — and the team would be challenged to write up a manual for how to deal with each disaster. It was, they said, more fun than the fantasy war game Dungeons & Dragons.


Zac Moffatt, Romney’s digital director, did not have the luxury of Reed’s time or resources. Moffatt came from the world of politics, had worked at the Republican National Committee and had long believed Romney would be the best GOP candidate for president.


Moffatt played catch-up from the start. He had 14 people working for him in the primaries and then, around May 1, he submitted a general election plan that required at least 110 people and would eventually have 160. Obama was far ahead. Moffatt recalled his assignment in daunting terms: “Can we do 80 percent of what the Obama campaign is doing, in 20 percent of the time, at 10 percent of the cost?’’


Moffatt’s team nonetheless managed to create big projects on short notice. For example, one of the highest priorities was a Facebook app that would enable the Romney campaign to locate voters who otherwise could not be found by telephone. By some estimates, half of younger voters do not have a landline or cannot be reached by cellphone. Three weeks before Election Day, the app was unveiled by the campaign and downloaded by 40,000 Romney supporters.


There was only one problem. Months earlier, Obama’s campaign had developed a similar app, which had been downloaded by 1 million people.


I questioned why they didn’t spend more time and energy early defining Romney in a fuller way so people could identify with him,’’ [David] Axelrod [Obama’s senior strategist] said in a post-election interview.


One of my conclusions is so much of his life was kind of walled off from use. His faith is important to him, but they didn’t want to talk about that. His business was important, but they didn’t want to talk about that much. His governorship was important to him, but his signature achievement [health care] was unhelpful to them in the Republican primary. My feeling is you have to build a candidacy on the foundation of biography. That is what authenticates your message. I was always waiting for that to happen.’’


Axelrod jumped at the opening. In a major gamble, the Obama campaign moved $65 million in advertising money that had been budgeted for September and October into June, enabling the president to unleash a series of attacks that would define Romney at a time when the Republican would have little money to respond.


From Axelrod’s viewpoint, the timing was perfect. Romney had been weakened by assaults from fellow GOP candidates during the primaries. Romney alienated many Hispanics by suggesting that illegal immigrant families should “self- deport,’’ and he said he had been a “severely conservative’’ governor, hurting his strategy to move to the middle for the general election.


...


Obama’s campaign had far more people on the ground, for longer periods, and backed by better data. In Florida, for example, the Romney campaign said it had fewer than 200 staff members on the ground, a huge commitment of its total of 500 nationwide. But the Obama campaign had 770 staff in Florida out of 3,000 or so nationwide.


They had more staff in Florida than we had in the country, and for longer,’’ said Romney adviser Ron Kaufman.


Indeed, in swing state after swing state, the Obama field team was much bigger than the Romney troops. Obama had 123 offices in Ohio, compared with Romney’s 40. Obama had 59 offices in Colorado, compared with Romney’s 15, according to statistics compiled by the Obama campaign.


Romney’s confidence remained strong as Election Day approached. While public polls showed Obama in control, some of Romney’s internal polls showed him winning.

But Obama’s field organization was too strong. In Florida, 266,000 more Hispanics voted than four years earlier. “They altered the face of the election by driving up the Latino turnout,’’ Romney political director Rich Beeson said. “They told us they would do it. I didn’t think they would do it, and they did.’’


Ohio was the greatest surprise of all. Romney pollster Neil Newhouse calculated that 209,000 more African-Americans voted this year than in 2008 in Ohio, while 329,000 fewer whites had voted.


I don’t know how that’s possible,’’ Newhouse said. “If that is what the Obama campaign achieved, hats off to them.’’


A key difference was the depth of voter contact. Romney took comfort in polls that showed voters had been contacted equally by both campaigns. But the polls were misleading, perhaps equating a recorded robocall on the phone with a house call by a worker.



As dawn broke on Election Day, 800 Romney volunteers filled the floor of TD Garden in Boston. This was the centerpiece of the campaign’s turnout operation, code named ORCA, that was supposed to swallow Obama’s Narwhal program. But the Romney team was so determined to keep ORCA secret that it had never run a test at TD Garden; it had only gone through some lesser runs in a different building.


The ORCA workers were supposed to be in contact with more than 30,000 volunteers stationed at polling places across the country. Those volunteers were told to bring a smartphone and go to a secure Web page on which they could report the names of everyone who voted. In this way, the Romney campaign could determine if supporters had failed to show up and urge them to vote.


But as volunteers on Election Day began tapping in the names of voters, it became clear something was wrong.


The system was so overloaded with incoming data from volunteers that it exceeded capacity and crashed.


The Obama campaign, which had suffered a similar meltdown in 2008 and had been zealous about testing its systems this time around, had no glitches. Tens of thousands of Obama volunteers across the country sent real-time data from polling places, enabling workers at Chicago headquarters to ensure that expected vote totals were on track. More importantly, the field organization put in place by Jeremy Bird hit its goals, turning out the needed number of voters to reelect the president.


Exit polls told a stunning story. The majority of voters preferred Romney’s visions, values, and leadership. But he had clearly failed to address the problem that Romney’s own family worried about from the start. Obama beat Romney by an astonishing 81 to 18 percent margin on the question of which candidate “cares about people like me.’’


That finding still frustrates those closest to Romney. His former lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey, who believed the campaign wasted an opportunity to highlight Romney’s life at the convention, said, “even at the end of the campaign, I never felt that the American people understood Mitt Romney’s genuine character and that is a terrible shame.’’


Romney, who did not respond to an interview request, was ultimately responsible for his campaign’s failings. Republicans variously blamed factors such as a candidate who was too moderate or not moderate enough, a lower-than-expected turnout of white voters for Romney coupled with a heavy minority vote for Obama, and the president’s leadership during the Sandy storm.


Inevitably, much of the blame has been directed at Stevens, and he hasn’t ducked it. “If there’s blame to be thrown, throw it my way,’’ he said. But he said it should be noted that Obama had no primary opponents, giving him an enormous advantage (Kranish 1-25).



Works cited:


Goldfields, David, “What We Can Learn about America from the 2012 Presidential Election.” American Studies Journal, 58 (2014). Web. June 9, 2020. http://www.asjournal.org/58-2014/what-we-can-learn-from-the-2012-presidential-election/


Hohmann, James, “Campaign Officials Dissect Election.” Politico, December 8, 2012. Web.

https://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/campaign-officials-dissect-election-cycle-084796


Kranish, Michael, “The Story behind Mitt Romney’s Loss in the Presidential Campaign to President Obama.” Boston.com, December 22, 2012. Web. https://www.boston.com/uncategorized/noprimarytagmatch/2012/12/22/the-story-behind-mitt-romneys-loss-in-the-presidential-campaign-to-president-obama


Sinderbrand, Rebecca, “Analysis: Obama Won with a Better Ground Game.” CNN. November 7, 2012. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2012/11/07/politics/analysis-why-obama-won/index.html

 

Sunday, September 27, 2020

Recent Presidential Elections -- 2012 -- The Debates

 

Romney proposed months of intense preparation, with 16 mock debates. (Obama did 11.) Then, just as Romney seemed ready, the campaign received news that a video had been leaked in which the candidate characterized 47 percent of Americans as “victims’’ who wanted government benefits and would never vote for him. That left the impression that Romney was referring not just to people on welfare but also to recipients of Social Security and veterans benefits. It seemed to confirm the worst view of Romney, that he didn’t care about average people. His poll numbers plummeted



After some lethargic rehearsals, in which Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts played the Romney role, Obama never mentioned the 47 percent controversy during the first debate. The president skipped at least two practice sessions at which he was going to review material. Obama seemed as unready as Romney was ready. “This was an exposure of Mitt Romney that people hadn’t seen before,’’ said [Neil] Newhouse [Romney’s election pollster]. “He had been a caricature who’d outsourced jobs, offshored jobs. The Mitt Romney they saw in debates was articulate, thoughtful, and had a plan.’’ Romney’s rating went up by 9 points in some key states, … (Kranish 15).

Obama’s team pressured their distracted boss to take Mitt Romney more seriously and bear down during debate practice — and he shot back, accusing them of sending him into battle with a mushy, ill-defined plan of attack. “This is all great,” he told the team during one of 11 prep sessions he attended, most of them at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. “But what am I actually supposed to do when I get onto the stage? You are telling me what not to do. I feel like I’m getting a lot of contradictory advice, guys” (Thrush and Martin 1).


Obama was frustrated with the contradictory advice he was getting from top aides before the Denver debate. In August, Obama’s debate prep team drafted a detailed strategy memo for the initial faceoff that called for Obama to take the fight to Romney, according to campaign officials. “He’s going to come out and do that Massachusetts moderate routine,” senior strategist David Axelrod told a colleague at the time. “And we’ve got to call bullshit on him.” But after Romney’s “47 percent’ debacle, advisors’ urged Obama to pull back a bit, to seem more presidential and less caustic. Obama and his team flew west on September 30, still not quite sure of how to handle Romney.

The Obama high command was deeply worried about their candidate’s preparedness as Denver drew closer. As he prepped outside of Las Vegas before the first debate, the small circle of aides who saw the raw video of one of the practice sessions could see how bad things were. The optics were chillingly Nixon 1960. Obama was grim and hardly making eye contact with Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, his debate partner.


He particularly hated the post-prep session where the team sat together and reviewed the video. During one, as the team was critiquing his performance, Obama got up, said, “Enough!” and walked out.

Obama adviser [Valerie] Jarrett – a close friend of the First Family but an unpopular figure with much of the president’s staff – was irritated with the debate team after the Denver debacle. Another adviser said she made it clear “the team, and not just the president, made a strategic miscalculation” and needed to “adjust their antennae.” She hadn’t been part of the debate team and demanded to know why Obama’s other aides hadn’t gotten a heads-up that he was about to bomb. Her intervention made the situation more fraught than it needed to be, and they took steps to calm the situation (Thrush and Martin 6-7).


[This man] with unshakeable confidence was deeply shaken by his own failure in Denver — far more than anyone on the outside could have known at the time. Intuitively, Obama and his top advisers quietly waged a campaign-within-a-campaign to buck up their bummed-out candidate and, even more quietly, to purge distractions and negativity from his midst (Thrush and Martin 2).


Second Debate


He waited all of 45 seconds to make clear he came not just ready for a fight but ready to pick one.


President Obama, who concluded that he was “too polite” in his first debate with Mitt Romney, made sure no one would say that after their second. He interrupted, he scolded, he filibustered, he shook his head.


He tried to talk right over Mr. Romney, who tried to talk over him back. The president who waited patiently for his turn last time around forced his way into Mr. Romney’s time this time. At one point, he squared off with Mr. Romney face to face, almost chest to chest, in the middle of the stage, as if they were roosters in a ring.



The strategy for Tuesday night was clear: undercut Mr. Romney’s character and credibility by portraying him as lying about his true positions on issues like taxes and abortion. Time and again, Mr. Obama questioned whether the man on stage with him was the same “severely conservative” candidate who tacked right in the Republican primaries.


He painted Mr. Romney as a tool of big oil who is soft on China, hard on immigrants, politically crass on Libya and two-faced on guns and energy. He deployed many of the attack lines that went unused in Denver, going after Mr. Romney’s business record, his personal income taxes and, in the debate’s final minutes, his comments about the 47 percent of Americans he once deemed too dependent on government.


Governor Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan,” Mr. Obama charged. “He has a one-point plan,” which is to help the rich, he said.


He mocked Mr. Romney by noting that he once closed a coal plant as the governor of Massachusetts. “Now suddenly you’re a big champion of coal,” he said.


As for trade, he said, “Governor, you’re the last person who’s going to get tough on China.”


And he pressed Mr. Romney for not disclosing how he would pay for his tax and deficit reduction goals. “We haven’t heard from the governor any specifics beyond Big Bird and eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood,” he said.


Mr. Romney held his own and gave as good as he got, presenting Mr. Obama as a failed president who has piled on trillions of dollars of debt, left millions of Americans without work, bungled security for American personnel in Libya, done nothing to reform entitlement programs and deserted a middle class “crushed under the policies of a president who has not understood what it takes to get the economy working again.”


But it was Mr. Obama who was the central story line of the night, his performance coming across as a striking contrast to that of his first face-off with Mr. Romney. For days leading up to Tuesday night’s encounter, Mr. Obama huddled in a Virginia resort with advisers to practice a more aggressive approach without appearing somehow inauthentic or crossing over a line of presidential dignity. It was a line he would stride up to repeatedly over the course of more than 90 minutes, and some will argue that he slipped over it at times.



His aggressive approach came as no surprise to Mr. Romney’s camp. It was clear from the start when Mr. Obama made sure to use the first question — from a college student worried about finding a job — to jab Mr. Romney for opposing the way the president went about the auto industry bailout of 2009.


With each question that followed came another attack. When it was not his turn, Mr. Obama sat on a stool and looked at Mr. Romney as he talked, rather than staring down and taking notes as he did in Denver. There was little smirking, though he did project at times an air of tolerant dismissal (Baker 1-3).


When an undecided young woman voter asked Obama and Romney how they plan to rectify wage inequality in the workplace, Romney thought he could go in for the kill and show women he cared.


He explained that he was surprised to find men occupying cabinet positions and asked his staff if they could find women who were equally qualified for them. “I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ And they brought us whole binders full of women,” Romney said to prove he had taken a “concerted effort” to find qualified women.


Within minutes of his speech, a Tumblr parody was created, #bindersfullofwomen became a trending Twitter hashtag and the phrase was the second-highest Google search term during the debate.


Romney sparred with Obama over unfair trading practices in China, and admitted to having invested in Chinese firms. But he then confronted Obama and asked him repeatedly if he had looked at his own pension.


You know, I don’t look at my pension. It’s not as big as yours so it doesn’t take as long. I don’t check it that often,” Obama responded to Romney’s line of questioning.


While Romney thought he got a leg up by accusing Obama of having investments in China and the Cayman Islands, the real winner online was the president. His response was the top searched Google query during the debate, particularly in Virginia, New Jersey, Ohio and Illinois (Shanker 1).


Evidently intent on redeeming himself by getting in all the points he failed to get in last time, Mr. Obama pushed right past time limits and at one point even refused to yield when the moderator, Candy Crowley of CNN, tried to rein him in (Baker 3).


In the town hall-style forum at Hofstra University on Long Island, the candidates roamed the stage, circling, interrupting and at times heckling one another as they took questions from an audience of 80 undecided voters.

The moderator, CNN's Candy Crowley, often had to intervene to keep order.

The 11 questions from the voters present ranged from gun control to Libya to immigration, but the main focus was on the economy.

The most dramatic clash came over foreign policy, and the attack last month [September 11] on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which left the US ambassador and three other Americans dead.

Mr Romney sought to portray the attack as evidence of the Obama administration's failing foreign policy and he suggested Mr Obama had dithered over admitting a terrorist attack had occurred.

Mr Obama shot back that he had said so the day after the attack, in an appearance at the White House.

The Republican challenged this, saying: "It took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror."

When Ms Crowley confirmed that Mr Obama had indeed called the attack an "act of terror" the day after the attack, the president told the moderator: "Say that a little louder, Candy."

The president also accused Mr Romney of using the Libyan events for political purposes. "While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release, trying to make political points, and that's not how a commander-in-chief operates," he said.

Mr Obama accused Mr Romney of inconsistency, and contrasted his own bailout of the US car industry with the Republican's position that car-makers should have been allowed to go bankrupt.

In turn, Mr Romney blamed the president for unemployment of 20 million and bloated federal deficits.

America, he insisted, could not afford another four years with Mr Obama at the helm, warning that Mr Obama's policies would ultimately prove as disastrous as the euro debt crisis.

"We've gone from $10tn of national debt to $16tn of national debt," he said.

"If the president were re-elected, we'd go to almost $20tn of national debt. This puts us on a road to Greece."

Mr Obama said voters had heard no specifics on Mr Romney's "sketchy" economic plan apart from eliminating Sesame Street's Big Bird and cutting funding for Planned Parenthood, a family planning organisation Republicans say promotes abortion (Mardell 1-3).

Third Debate

Barack Obama went on the offensive over foreign policy in the third and final presidential debate, repeatedly accusing Mitt Romney of flip-flopping on major international issues but failing to deliver a killer blow to his opponent's resurgent campaign.


While the president emerged as the narrow winner on the night, the encounter, which was cordial and largely uneventful compared with the previous two debates, is unlikely to have much impact on the outcome of the election.


Going into the debate at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, Obama had an inbuilt advantage on foreign policy and security. As president, with access to daily briefings by intelligence analysts, diplomats and generals, he is better briefed and it showed as he dominated Romney in the first half of the debate.


The Republican candidate appeared unsure at times and occasionally stumbled over his lines as if struggling to remember his briefing notes. He began sweating as Obama, aggressive from the start, got the better of him during exchanges on Iran, Iraq and Russia as well as on US military spending.



"What we need to do with respect to the Middle East is strong, steady leadership, not wrong and reckless leadership that is all over the map," said Obama. "And unfortunately that's the kind of opinions that you've offered throughout this campaign, and it is not a recipe for American strength, or keeping America safe over the long haul."


But with a growing sense in the Republican camp that the White House might just be within reach after all, Romney appeared happy to settle for a safe, gaffe-free performance in which his main goal was to reassure the US public that he was not a warmonger.



One of the most telling moments came when Obama, in a flash of normally suppressed arrogance, lectured Romney on military developments as if he was a child. Responding to a pledge by Romney to increase military spending and a complaint that the navy had fewer ships, Obama resorted to heavy sarcasm.


"You mentioned the navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1917. Well, governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines," Obama said.


But Romney did not crumple and recovered in the second half ...


On the Middle East he said an attack on Iran would be a last resort and that he was against direct US military involvement in Syria. He sought to neutralise the advantage Obama enjoys thanks to the killing of Osama bin Laden by insisting that his own policy was about more than "going after the bad guys". "We can't just kill our way out of this mess," Romney said.


Romney managed to get in some hits on Obama too, accusing him of having conducted "an apology tour" of the Middle East at the start of his presidency and this was perceived by America's enemies as a sign of weakness. "Mr President, America has not dictated to other nations. We have freed other nations from dictators," he said.


The idea that Obama is an apologist for American values resonates strongly among conservatives.



Surprisingly there was almost nothing on the Benghazi consulate attack. Having twice botched the issue Romney opted against returning to it in depth (MacAskill “Obama” 1-3).



Works cited:


Baker, Peter, “For the President, Punch, Punch, Another Punch.” The New York Times, October 17, 2012. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/us/politics/in-second-debate-obama-strikes-back.html


Kranish, Michael, “The Story behind Mitt Romney’s Loss in the Presidential Campaign to President Obama.” Boston.com, December 22, 2012. Web. https://www.boston.com/uncategorized/noprimarytagmatch/2012/12/22/the-story-behind-mitt-romneys-loss-in-the-presidential-campaign-to-president-obama


MacAskill, Ewan, “Obama and Romney Clash over Foreign Policy in Final Presidential Debate.” The Guardian, October 23, 2012. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/23/third-presidential-debate-obama-wins


Mardell, Mark, editor, “Obama Hits Back in Fiery Second Debate with Romney.” BBC News, October 17, 2012. Web. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-19976820


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