Barack Obama and Mitt Romney Face Off for the Second Time
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In the weeks following the Democratic Party’s convention, Obama gained a significant advantage in national polls, and held even larger leads in swing states such as Ohio and Florida. Pundits and pollsters were united in the thesis that the debate wouldn't alter the course of the election. Voters cast their ballots based on economic issues, the thinking went, and this debate, like presidential debates in the past, would do little to change their minds.
As with many inferences from the social sciences, this one failed to predict the outcome of the debate. Watched by seventy million people, President Obama put in a listless, untidy performance. He looked tired and spoke unemotionally, spent a great deal of time taking notes, provided few specifics, and closed his argument with a weak, rambling statement. His challenger smoothly presented himself as a moderate problem-solver and assailed the president’s economic record with a full quiver of sharp statistics.
A series of polls has demolished the pre-debate consensus. The Pew Research Center had given Obama a lead of eight percentage points in the period before the first debate. After the debate, its data showed a twelve point swing towards Romney. While this poll may have been an aberration, the Real Clear Politics average of polls showed Obama’s lead narrowed from 3.1 points to less than a point, well within the margin of error. His advantage shrank among women, younger voters, and swing state voters. On Intrade, a prediction market, Obama’s odds of victory tumbled from close to eighty percent to about sixty-one percent today.
In April, I judged Intrade’s odds for President Obama’s reelection, which were then also sixty-one percent, to be too high. By dint of his education and track record as a competent manager of large organizations, I argued that Romney was an “exceptionally qualified candidate for the presidency.” I acknowledged that Romney’s “famously elastic positions” and “stiff, even wooden” bearing would dim his prospects in the election, but also noted :
In the course of the Republican primary, Romney has demonstrated an ominous talent for striking at the jugular. He seized on Rick Perry’s weak debate performances and ill-considered comments on Social Security to reduce the once formidable Texas governor to a sideshow. In Florida, a resurgent Newt Gingrich was weakened by a fusillade of attack ads and knocked out by Romney’s probing questions in a debate on the eve of the primary. Romney has seen off challenges by Tim Pawlenty, Michelle Bachmann, and Herman Cain. He will launch a disciplined and aggressive record on Obama’s economic record.
Obama is still the most talented politician of his generation, with major accomplishments to his name: the passage of a massive fiscal stimulus, an expansion of health insurance to close to forty-seven million uninsured Americans, a successful restructuring of the auto industry, a sounder US foreign policy, and the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
But in April I wrote that “America’s long deleveraging will still be in motion in the fall,” and that “many of his policies, including the Recovery Act and the Affordable Care Act, remain unpopular.” In short, Obama would find it very difficult to defend his economic policies to voters who (mostly in error) blame or credit presidents for the fluctuations of the business cycle.
Ultimately, this is the main reason why Obama lost the first debate: he cannot run on his record of domestic policies. The unemployment rate has dipped to 7.8%, but twenty-three million Americans remain out of work. Regardless of whether he improves his style of debate, the President cannot change these facts.
As to the substance, there is disconcertingly little of it. Romney has rightly received a hiding from many quarters for laying out a lavish $5 trillion banquet of tax cuts without specifying how he would pay for them. Nor has he detailed how he would “repeal and replace” Obamacare, how he would put Medicare on a sound financial footing, or why the US should expand its already enormous military spending.
Yet, the President has laid out an equally spare agenda for a second term. The first result of a Google search for “Obama agenda” is a link to the 2008 policy proposals of “The Office of the President Elect.” His current platform is a wish list of such worthy goals as “doubling US exports by the end of 2014”, “creating 1 million new manufacturing jobs,” and “cutting the growth of college tuition and fees in half” with little indication of how these targets will be achieved through policy and within the constraints of a Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
In June, Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, wrote a long article about Obama’s agenda if he were reelected. Lizza suggested several possibilities: cap and trade legislation, immigration reform, and a grand bargain on taxes, spending, and the federal deficit. What is remarkable is that despite quoting numerous top administration officials, the article could not clearly answer the simple question in its byline: what would Obama do in a second term? If the president still cannot answer that question in his next bout with Romney, he is destined to lose the debate and with it, perhaps, the election.