Justified
Democrats come back; Republicans blames everyone they can think of
What a difference a few weeks can make — or a single night, for that matter.
Heading into their first debate, Obama was riding high on the strength of double-digit leads in almost every battleground, national, demographic and issue-related poll, and it was widely assumed that he would chew up and spit out his undeserving challenger without so much as breaking a sweat. I was a part of this group, and planned to phone in my column that week. It was all so perfect — I was going to catch up on “Survivor.”
Then the debate actually happened. You know the rest. Republicans gloated, Democrats wrung their hands in panic — why was Obama so listless? Apathy? Underestimated his opponent? Benadryl? — and even noted Obama cheerleader/synthetic testosterone advocate Andrew Sullivan had to be talked off of the ledge. I stand by the fact that when it came to actually telling the truth, Obama won that thing by a Paul Ryan 5K time. There were so many holes in Romney’s talking points, so many (I hate that I’m using this meme) Etch-a-Sketch moments in that debate, it was impossible to fact-check them all on the fly.
In a way, that was part of the brilliance of the Romney team’s plan. They know good and damn well that most Americans don’t start paying attention to the election until the debates start, because most Americans are lazy nitwits who can’t be bothered to give a serious thought as to who should run the freaking country. And so, come debate time, all the “severe conservative” stances Romney had taken during the GOP primary and into the following summer (overturning Roe v. Wade, defunding Planned Parenthood, repealing all of Obamacare, etc.) were magically rubbed out as he made a 90-degree shift to the center. Of course Obama had no answer for it. If you spent weeks preparing for a bare-knuckle brawl with a Muay Thai expert, then entered the ring and saw a basket of kittens instead, what would you do? That’s right: you’d s**t your pants out of sheer confusion.
But that was the last trick that the Romney team had up its sleeve. The Obama camp readjusted and, during these last three debates, Romney and Ryan were sliced apart and stitched back together so much that they qualify as a Batman villain. Joe Biden highlighted enormous logical and logistical gaps in the Ryan budget plan, and treated the half-man/half-tarsier with all the disdain he deserved. In the second presidential debate, Obama tore into Mitt with a vengeance, called out his flip-flopping — a phrase I admit we’ve co-opted from the 2004 race — and invited the GOP contender to take his best shots.
Undoubtedly the best moment came when Romney, winding up for his bolo punch, tried to call out the president on his apparent negligence to refer to the Libya attack as “an act of terror.” Whether or not that matters in the first place is another argument, but the exchange was beautiful to watch. Obama calmly replied, “Proceed, Governor.” Proceed Mitt did, and in doing so inserted his own foot so far down his throat, proctologists are still picking leg hairs out of his colon.
This final debate was even more of a trouncing. Romney changed his position again and often, sometimes within the same train of thought. A true gem: “We can’t kill our way out of this,” just minutes before “We’ve got to go after the bad guys and kill them.” He supported initiatives around the world that he wouldn’t support here at home, including equal rights for women, minorities and the economically disadvantaged. He agrees that Assad has to be removed from Syria, but also says that we shouldn’t have any military presence in Syria whatsoever. Trying to follow Mitt Romney’s train of thought is like playing tag with a ghost: it only ends in stupidity and sadness.
And Obama brought it. Bolstered by a foreign policy record rife with diplomatic involvement and bin Laden-killing, he not only firmly justified the last four years of his presidency, but clearly illustrated that Romney has a cursory-to-nonexistent understanding of how the world, international relations and our own military work. Again, he did this mostly by using Romney’s own words against him. Not long ago, Romney expressed disappointment that our navy has less ships than it did in 1916. Obama pointed out that we also have less bayonets and horses, that our might is measured now in capability and not mass. He ripped Romney apart for his assertion that Russia is our No. 1 geopolitical threat, despite the fact that we are allies, and the Cold War has been done now for over two decades.
Even if we’re just going on appearances, tone and body language — which is apparently a thing, as one Fox News pundit said after the last debate that you could really tell who won by watching without the sound on — Obama destroyed Romney. The president was calm yet calculating, aggressive yet measured, and only disdainful when the situation absolutely called for it. Romney, by contrast, was sputtering, sweaty and could barely string a sentence together without going off on a tangent, or trying to segue into a question that Bob Schieffer hadn’t even asked.
I recap all of this not to gloat (maybe a little), but to illustrate how the different camps’ reactions to each subsequent debate illuminates a greater truth in the liberal and conservative zeitgeists. See, I’ve followed the half-baked circus called the GOP for a couple of years now, and every time I see a group of them together — booing a gay soldier, cheering at the prospect of letting an uninsured man die, railing against free national healthcare — I wonder, “What is wrong with these people?”
The answer, I think, lies in the debate fallout. After the first one, a whopping 70 percent of Americans thought Romney won the debate. Democratic strategists freaked, and rightfully so. Then, after subsequent thrashings of their counterparts by Obama and Biden, they were found to have won the same vote, but by much slimmer margins, though the beatings were infinitely more severe. Democrats were relieved and acted as such, but GOP shill outlets like The National Review and Fox News spun the outcome six ways from Sunday. Hell, Rush Limbaugh called Candy Crowley a terrorist for simply being a good journalist and well-prepared moderator.
Conservatives will hump their hatred of Obama all the way to judgment day, and we can see that in the immediate “Who Won?” polls: that 70 percent margin of victory for Romney in the first one is a combination of hardcore GOPers, plus liberals who choose to believe what their eyes, ears and logic tell them. The slimmer margins in favor of Obama and Biden came about as a result of conservatives refusing to acknowledge reality.
This is a fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives. When things go bad for us lefties, we allow ourselves a moment of teeth-gnashing, then we set to figuring out what went wrong, and knock it out of the park next time. When things go bad for conservatives, they blame everyone and everything but themselves. It is a state of mind that underscores their irrational, egocentric fear, as well as a stupefying sense of entitlement.
Tommy Tiernan once said of his four-year-old son: “If reality does not meet the demands of his imagination, he simply abandons it.” Salient, that.You Might Also Like:
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