Wednesday afternoon, I am sad to report, I correctly predicted why Mitt Romney would be declared the winner of last night’s first presidential debate. Here’s how I began yesterday’s diary:
Mitt Romney is already the winner. Here’s why: superior stagecraft and tons of money.
CNN polling today of viewers had Romney as the winner with 67 percent of the sample giving him the victory -- a record in the history of such post-debate polling. As I predicted, Mitt Romney was seen as having done a credible acting job in his first audition as the Republican nominee. Seeming to channel the combined vocal facility of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (a chilling sound if there ever was one), Romney pressed his arguments with more energy and a superior ability to rebut President Obama’s meeker critical thrusts.
The result, as I predicted some six hours before the debate, was probably not an election game-changer but rather an opening to undecided voters for Romney to exploit:
...undecided viewers, as well as advocates of the president who are professing lower enthusiasm for their choice this election season, received all the visual cues they needed to seriously allow themselves to consider -- perhaps for the first time -- Mitt Romney playing the most influential part any person could assume on the world stage
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Daily Kos critics of my diary were swiftly and unfailingly wrong, and not polite, either. Just one example, posted by bibble:
The diary is ludicrous on its face. What a load of tripe.
More of a concern to me, though, than any mindless dismissals were comments suggesting that readers mistook my use of the words “Hollywood” and “script,” wrongly suggesting that my “script” was ill-conceived. I wasn’t proposing any script. I was trying to elucidate the stagecraft advantage I expected Romney to deliver. Here’s how I alluded, correctly I believe, to the Mitt Romney performance he actually delivered last night:
Mitt Romney is a super-wealthy individual who appears to have the potential to fill the role one might imagine a Hollywood casting agent would seek for a presidential movie. He’s Michael Douglas with a taller forehead. A latter-day Ronald Reagan with a better command of tax avoidance, if not the delivery of his screenplay’s lines.
I then continued to outline how the staging of these debates would affect viewer perceptions of them, and again, based on posted commentary today these effects definitely played a factor in the perceived outcome. One Romney advantage I cited:
Mitt Romney came out the winner Wednesday night because of some major built-in personal advantages he has in approaching these auditions. We have known, for example, that he himself strongly believes in his fitness for the role.
I then went on to cite Romney’s father’s own failed presidential campaign leading up to the 1968 Republican nomination as potentially a motivating factor that would give Romney more passion on-stage, which was evident last night.
Post-debate public comments on Facebook and Twitter confirm my prediction that the president suffered from a deficit of energy and passion. In particular, Obama’s lack of engagement during Romney’s turns to speak (where Obama dropped his head and looked disengaged) left Obama with few notable rebuttal points during his more generously timed response opportunities. Here was my take Wednesday afternoon on the consequences of that issue:
By nature a cool customer, the president was exposed to subjective comparisons this particular man might certainly wish were ruled off limits: emotion, passion, ideological purity.
Prior to the meeting in Denver, I also noted how the debate format itself would hamper Obama, and suggested why:
Tonight’s debate locked the incumbent candidate in a place with no escape route from exposure to fallacious arguments or scripted attacks on his record. That is especially advantageous to Romney in light of this year’s particularly mendacious Republican campaign playbook. For the incumbent standing behind a podium on that stark stage tonight, there was no hunkering down behind the securely locked doors of the White House Situation Room or using the flag-draped backdrops of the office to burnish his message.
Declared the winner, Romney today is ramping up efforts to build on his debate performance via post-debate media spin (a prediction I admit was easy to imagine with Obama losing):
By Thursday, the presidential reelection campaign will be feeling the full force of the Republican Party’s media carpet bombing and the probable turn of voter sentiments toward their candidate, who, they will argue, they’ve successfully positioned as the “underdog.”
Expect to see a barrage of Republican attack ads that will seek to put the president on the defensive over unemployment and worldwide Muslim unrest, drive up the incumbent’s negative ratings in the polls, and build on Romney’s “good first impression,” freshly viewed. The media will, of course, buy into the excitement of such a tightening race, thereby ensuring its fruition.
Aside from an advantage in stagecraft, I predicted the Romney-Ryan campaign also would benefit in the coming weeks from a massive infusion of money into campaign ads (again, highly likely given the unlimited infusions of SuperPac and 1 Percenters dollars):
Says a former political director at NBC News, Elizabeth Wilner, who is Campaign Media Analysis Group vice president for Kantar Media, considered to be the second largest global market research company: “All that money the Obama campaign has been expecting Romney to spend on ads will finally start to flow. The Obama campaign is betting on their message, while the Romney campaign is betting on tonnage.”
How should the president respond? Here’s what I called for yesterday:
Personally, I’d like to see Barack Obama turn in more scenes like the ones Jimmy Stewart had in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Passionate. Directly attacking the discredited myths baked into the many years of Republican shapeshifting. Confident that this time around, truth and good intentions will win out over lies and evil.
Mr. President, you need to become your own passionate on-stage fact-checker for the next two debates. You need to find the inner strength to defend us from the wealthy bullies of the world like Romney, who are all too willing to write us off as too insignificant to worry about. To me, a day after the first 2012 Presidential Debate, that still sounds like an obvious -- and winning -- road to re-election. My advice for Mitt Romney? Not to appear in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner just yet.