Although the horses, bayonets, and battleship segment from Obama provided a great jab, dressed down Romney for his empty rhetoric and amateurish knowledge of how government and military planning and spending actually function, and fed new memes that will dominate the next few weeks, I thought President Obama's KO moment came a little later. Below the fold, I look at what was, for me, the hay-maker.
President Obama's knock-out punch:
If we're going to talk about trips that we've taken -- when I was a candidate for office, first trip I took was to visit our troops. And when I went to Israel as a candidate, I didn't take donors. I didn't attend fundraisers. I went to Yad Beshef (ph), the Holocaust museum there, to remind myself the nature of evil and why our bond with Israel will be unbreakable.
And then I went down to the border towns of Storok (ph), which had experienced missiles raining dowm from Hamas. And I saw families there who showed me there where missiles had come down near their children's bedrooms. And I was reminded of what that would mean if those were my kids. Which is why as president, we funded an Iron Dome program to stop those missiles.
So that's how I've used my travels, when I travel to Israel and when I travel to the region. (Emphasis added)
In these three paragraphs, President Obama draws attention to Mr. 47%'s use of foreign trips, his ties to wealthy interests both here and abroad, and his focus on politics as an end itself, not a means to an end. Although not much has been made of this lately, by taking a trip to Israel to hold and attend fundraisers, Governor Romney encapsulated his priorities both as a man and as a presidential candidate. He spoke not to the people in the region, but to the elites of the region, both political and otherwise. In a telling display of how Romney views and approaches problems, his priority was not to use his time to truly understand the nature of life in Israel or grasp the toll of the incessant border conflicts on the people of the country. Romney's approach was to ask political leaders and business leaders in the country what the issues and problems were, receiving filtered, biased, and purposeful information from those who have an invested interest in misleading. Not only is that not showing American leadership, consulting only foreign elites for information at political fundraisers reveals a dangerous naivete that calls into question Romney's ability to make decisions reflective of America's best interest and not the simply allowing himself to be manipulated by elite interests elsewhere. Finally, it shows that Romney's priority is not understanding global conflicts, but the bottom line for his campaign. As with his career in vulture...er....private (in)equity, Romney puts money above all else.
President Obama perfectly contrasted this with his own leadership style and decision-making process. He visited the people on the ground: the troops, the families in the border towns. He sought direct experience of the nature and effects of the conflicts in the region so he could make an effective decision from his own experience, free from outside influence. And, once in office, the president implemented policies informed by his experiences on the ground. That is leadership, the leadership America so desperately needs. It is the kind of leadership that will heal the wounds created over 8 years of Republican recklessness. It is the kind of leadership that thoughtfully weighs consequences on real people, real lives, and makes decisions guided by experience, intelligence, empathy, and pragmatic problem-solving. And the last line, the line that really landed, capture perfectly why we need four more years with President Obama.