Jim Geraghty's Morning Jolt – October 17, 2012

From the Mailbox: Lots of links...
Here's your Wednesday Morning Jolt. Enjoy!
Jim

No Real Damage to Romney, But Some Big Opportunities Missed

CBS News: "CBS NEWS INSTANT POLL Who won debate? OBAMA: 37%; ROMNEY: 30%, TIE: 33% (Margin of Error: 4 pts. 65% say Romney won on issue of economy, compared to 34% who say Obama."

CNN's poll of registered voters who watched the debate: "46 percent said Obama won the debate, 39 percent said Romney won the debate." The sample splits 33 percent Democrat, 33 percent Republican, 33 percent independent.

I'll take that. It was a good night for Mitt Romney in a lot of ways, but in two areas, he had golden opportunities and failed to make the most of them: Libya and Fast and Furious.

On Libya, ◼ as I posted right after the debate last night:

The president showed glowering indignation over the accusation that his administration misled the public on what happened in Benghazi and why. It was a potential slam-dunk moment . . .

. . . and then Romney got caught up in what Obama said in the Rose Garden September 12. Take a look at Obama's Rose Garden comments ◼ here. Obama refers to the murder of Stevens and the other Americans as an "attack" -- duh -- but then he says: "Since our founding, the United States has been a nation that respects all faiths. We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. But there is absolutely no justification to this type of senseless violence. None."

Those lines clearly imply that the events were a reaction to the YouTube tape. The word "terror" appears once, in this context: "No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for. Today we mourn four more Americans who represent the very best of the United States of America."

That's not specifically referring to the Benghazi raid, although one could argue it's implied.

However, by telling the audience -- to applause! -- that Obama did refer to the murders as a terror attack, Candy Crowley is responsible for one of the most egregious misjudgments of any moderator in the history of presidential debates.

Still, the American people may remember the administration spending a lot of time talking about a YouTube video in the days after the Benghazi attack, and Obama's sudden insistence that his administration never really pushed that implausible-from-the-start alternate explanation may strike them as odd and implausible. Viewers may also notice that the president never responded to the audience member's question about what the administration did in response to the reports indicating Benghazi was growing increasingly dangerous.

The Libya exchange may not be as damaging for Romney as the Obama team may hope; it came more than seventy minutes into this debate. Other than some early fireworks, much of this debate seemed to plod along, with each candidate insisting that what the other was saying was just flat not true. But considering how many conservatives thought Libya could be a huge issue in these campaign's final weeks, Romney's handling is deeply disappointing.

The Washington Post's Charles Lane: "Upon reflection, the Rose Garden defense is vitiated by fact Obama refused to call it terrorism when asked point blank on The View."

◼ Andrea Tantaros: "A back and forth on Obama's Libya phrasing & actions is the last thing Obama needs because it shifts the issue to front burner three weeks before election."

◼ Keith Urbahn, former chief of staff to Donald Rumsfeld: "GOP spent 1 month assembling up facts on #Benghazi case. In 90 seconds it all evaporated with an epic Romney whiff on Libya Q."

◼ John O'Sullivan: "Romney won first half easy. Second half he fumbled immigration, missed open goal on Libya. Result: evens. But Romney more presidential than president."

Romney's Fast and Furious answer was technically fine, but it came near the end and he didn't have the passion and outrage I wanted to see.

◼ Chris Barron: "Romney needed a game changer in the 1st debate and got it, Obama needed a game changer tonight and didn't get it."

◼ Ben Smith: "Romney did, again, come away looking like a guy who could be president, which is probably the most important thing."

◼ Laura Ingraham: "Crowley gave life-line to Obama on Libya -- totally misleading. But Romney gave her the oppty to do this by not being SPECIFIC on Libya lies."

Michael Graham: "Hey, Obots -- calm down. First debate was a Romney blowout. This was a narrow Obama win. Election over? This will barely move polls."

◼ John Hinderaker: "Obama has been sliding in the polls, and also in the opinion of political commentators. He needed something to happen tonight to reverse his decline. I don't think he got it. He certainly was better than the impossibly lame president who showed up in Denver two weeks ago, but that is a low standard. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, continued to compete at a high level. The key factor in my view is that whenever the candidates talked about Obama's record, Romney clobbered the president. No surprise there: Obama's record is terrible, and the only question is whether it is front and center. Tonight it was, often enough."

◼ Ari Fleischer notices, "In 3 debates, Democrats have gotten a total of 8 minutes, 52 seconds more time. Each debate has given the Democrat more time. Needs to be fixed."

Look What Happens When Pollsters Use Likely Voter Models!

I've given ◼ Public Policy Polling some grief in the past, usually because I found their samples to have too much of one party or the other -- but usually Democrats -- to offer a realistic sense of what the electorate will look like on Election Day. Their most recent one -- the one giving so many Democrats heartburn -- has a ◼ three-point split between the two parties, right around what I've been expecting all year.

At ◼ Hot Air, Ed Morrissey chuckles at how Markos Moulitsas's write-up of the poll keeps emphasizing why he's skeptical of the results he's seeing: "You know an election is going poorly when an outfit commissions a poll, and then tries to argue that part of the results from its own poll is an outlier. Those Sunday results probably are an outlier, but they're eye-popping nonetheless. On a day when conservatives tend not to conduct a lot of political business, the responders gave Romney a twelve-point lead over Obama. As Markos notes, that sample has a margin of error of less than five points, too, with roughly 400 responses."

Looking back at that July 2010 piece about PPP, I'm pleased to see a two-sentence summary of my view on poll samples that holds up well today: "The partisan breakdown of each state's and district's electorates will shift from year to year, so pollsters are entitled to some leeway in their samples. But at some point, a poll sample just tilts too heavily to one party to be a reliable guide to the electorate as a whole."

This gets compared to Trutherism, the belief that the American government was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, in some circles.

Obama 2012: Because the American People Deserve a President Who Doesn't Like People

This sounds like a particularly ◼ honest assessment of Obama. Probably too honest:

Neera Tanden, a former aide to both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, ◼ had this to say about the relationship of the two presidents:

Clinton, being Clinton, had plenty of advice in mind and was desperate to impart it. But for the first two years of Obama's term, the phone calls Clinton kept expecting rarely came. "People say the reason Obama wouldn't call Clinton is because he doesn't like him," observes Tanden. "The truth is, Obama doesn't call anyone, and he's not close to almost anyone. It's stunning that he's in politics, because he really doesn't like people. My analogy is that it's like becoming Bill Gates without liking computers."

You know a statement like this ◼ had to be recanted, and quickly.

Tanden, now president of the Center for American Progress, suggested in her mea culpa that it was a poor choice of words.

"I was trying to say how President Obama, who I admire greatly, is a private person, but I deeply regret how I said it. I apologize," she wrote.

The description really fits, doesn't it? And mind you, I don't think that such a quality necessarily dooms a president. Nor do I think most of us who aren't Bill Clinton don't relate to Barack Obama's reluctance to have unnecessary conversations with others or schmooze.

If I've met you at CPAC or on a National Review cruise or some other gathering of righty folk, I've enjoyed the meeting but I find being social, or being "on," around strangers to be mentally and physically exhausting after a stretch. I've talked in previous Jolts about the tension between our public faces and our private faces, the one we present to the world and the one we present to our loved ones and friends. I can only imagine how much, exponentially, more draining it must be to be a politician, where you're in the public eye much more frequently, constantly encountering people who expect you to be a certain way and who expect the conversation you have with them to be enlightening and edifying and productive and encouraging and so on.

The fact that ◼ Sally Quinn is disappointed in Obama for staying home with his daughters most nights and not attending Georgetown parties is probably one of the best reasons to vote for him.

But after a while, the fact that President Obama isn't all that fond of us is going to start affecting his work. As Jodi Kantor wrote in The Obamas, "Later in the first term, there were points where the American public seemed to be giving up on Barack Obama. But the relationship went both ways, and there were many times the president seemed to be giving up on the public, too, convinced Americans would never understand his point of view."

ADDENDUM: ◼ The Anchoress: "Seriously, I liked both of these men better before this debate."

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