After the First Presidential Debate, Why Nothing Has Changed

Going into it, before  the key lights were lighted for the first presidential debate of the 2012 election season, word was that Mitt Romney needed to deliver a knock-out blow in order to revive his floundering campaign in what was hyped to be an all-out political brawl . And in the end it was a very good night for Mitt, in a boring fight where the ring official never really had control of the rounds.

Maybe that’s because we were expecting a sporting match and what we got was a two-headed lecture. This night, for those of us who make a sport of handicapping such things, had been drum rolled to an extreme. And most, if not all, of the hype was due to the GOP’s dismal campaign so far – the flat line polls after the running mate choice; the lack of a bump after the GOP convention; the 47% tape. To hear the pundits, everything for the Romney campaign was riding on the candidate’s performance in Denver. So when the drum roll led to the loud cymbal crash, we got Jim Lehrer  barely a presence; President Obama looking down at this notes, sounding tentative in his answers and missing obvious openings to make precise differentiating points; and Mitt Romney seizing the moment.

It was a night where, despite what President Obama’s advisers may have told him in his three days of preparations in Las Vegas, he  did what he wanted to do, and looked lackluster, biteless.

More importantly, though, Romney won on a night – set up to be a debate about domestic issues – where women and women’s issues were not mentioned once; where immigration was ignored; and where education was given no more than a superficial moment. Almost the entirety of the debate spun on a slow spiral about the economy. So somewhere between the second mention of Dodd-Frank and the first mention of Simpson-Bowles, I began to lose interest. And I consider myself somewhat attentive to these things. I wonder how it came across in middle America? Granted, the economy is the key issue of our time, and we’ve been clamoring for specifics, but while Americans want specificity we also want you to get to the point – we have a short and shrinking attention span and this open debate format was not good for bottom line specifics.

In the realm of winners and losers, Romney won this one. Lets look at what he won:

• Optics. You can’t ignore what the candidates look like on a televised debate. Obama looked like someone had forced him to be there; Romney looked like a freshly cut head of lettuce – ready, ripe, in his moment.
• Republican partisans will emerge energized – they’ll raise more money and get better organized for the next five weeks.
• Democrats (and Democratic partisans) will  make up for the President’s not mentioning the infamous 47% in the debate by ratcheting up that line of attack in their campaign ads.
• In the electoral map, red states will remain red, blue states stay blue.
• The same swing states will still be swing states and the same undecided voters in those states will remain undecided. I don’t think the debate did anything to change anyone’s mind or sway enough undecided’s to make a difference.

In the context of what was supposed to be accomplished, we don’t know if anything was. This is, after all, about the election on November 6, not about the reaction on October 4.  This could have been an election defining moment for either of the candidates, but it wasn’t.

In the end, the advantage goes to Romney. He’s won the opportunity for the undecided voters to give him a second look, and that’s huge. But his campaign shouldn’t forget their own party’s history. Ronald Reagan and George W. both had bad first debates in their reelection years.

[Photo by DonkeyHotey]