donkeyhotey photo
On
this night , the professor stayed home.
Instead, on an evening less
than a fortnight's distance from All Hallows Eve, his equally-brainy, dark side
alter ego appeared and delivered a debate performance scintillating enough to
rekindling the tingle up Chris Matthews' legs.
It's as if "no drama" had somehow become "pure drama" Obama. This perhaps previously unseen Dark Professor
flat out mopped the floor with the professional businessman resulting in a
celestial-like post-debate glow that radiated long after the debate had
concluded. Heck even George Will called
it "immeasurably the best in American History." In any event, it left a glow that the
President deliciously savored. He stayed
on what had been a white hot debate floor for some thirty-minutes after Mitt
and his crew had slinked off into the night.
While Mitt certainly enjoyed
his moments, those moments that really counted often found Romney perched in
stiffened silence. By two-thirds the way
through, the GOP nominee was projecting as if cognizant of his starring role in
a real-time occurrence of the dispiriting side
of personal evolution that in politics, can play out in a matter of seconds: a
big shot being reduced to a little shorty.
What a turnaround. But was it planned? I've heard some observers theorize that
Obama's defenseless performance in Debate One was deliberate; a kind of rope-a-dope
strategy actually designed to groom Romney for the brutal victimization that
occurred Tuesday evening. There's
certainly no denying that in their initial encounter, rebuttals by Obama to Romney's
debate-long barrage of embellishments, denials, distortions and outright lies were
both perplexingly sparse and agonizingly weak.
There's also no denying that as
a result, Obama conceded to Romney an unfettered forum from which Mitt would
lay out his campaign's easily rebuttable narrative on themes involving taxes
and fiscal strategy, immigration policy and a women's right to choose. For some 67 million Americans -- many of whom
had paid no real prior attention to either candidate's campaign mumbo jumbo -- that
initial debate was their opportunity to hear Romney's counter to the narrative
put forth about Mitt by the Obama campaign all summer; and hear it directly
from the mouth of the candidate himself.
As the rope-a-dope theory goes, the idea was to give Mitt all the rope Obama needs to hogtie Romney in the second
debate.
According to this scenario, when
during the first debate, Romney flatly denied that his tax and fiscal proposals
create of a minimum $ 5 trillion hole in the budget, the absence of a strong rebuttal
from Obama would encourage the Romney campaign to use the week leading to
Tuesday's debate to reinforce that denial and other such false claims. As the theory goes, Obama spends that week
feigning an obsession
with "Big Bird" and ignoring the Romney campaign's work at locking into the
minds of voters the assertions, promises, premises, claims, and denials advanced
by Romney during that first debate.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
