… 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.
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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
Shanker, Dakshayani, “Five Best Moments from Obama and Romney’s 2012 Second Debate.” NBC News, Oct. 9, 2016. Web. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-presidential-debates/five-best-moments-obama-romney-s-2012-second-debate-n662121
Thrush, Glenn and Martin, Jonathan, “Plenty of 2012 Pitfalls for Obama and Romney.” Politico, December 17, 2012. Web. https://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/politico-ebook-plenty-of-2012-pitfalls-for-obama-and-romney-085152
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