An uninspiring final presidential debate

A neighbor and I chatted a few minutes yesterday about the 2012 campaign. We were both wondering why superpower America was incapable of producing more inspiring leadership. And uninspiring is how last night's final presidential debate struck me. Scanning the online coverage this morning, I found the Christian Science Monitor most nearly agreed with my assessment of the 3rd round of exchanges between Obama and Romney.  Without declaring a clear winner, staff writer Howard LaFranchi argues that both men appeared to have achieved their goals for the evenings:

President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney each used Monday night’s third and final debate to try to close the deal with a divided American electorate.

 

In a debate without any glaring gaffes and largely held in a more congenial tone than the combative encounter of last week, both men seemed to accomplish what they may have set out to do: Mr. Romney to come across as an acceptable commander in chief, Mr. Obama to portray a successful presidency while planting seeds of doubt about a challenger who recently has had the momentum.    

While the debate’s theme was ostensibly foreign policy, both candidates time and again brought their answers back to the domestic economy, jobs, and who would do the better job of building an America for the 21st century.

“After a decade of war, I think we all recognize we have to do some nation-building at home,” Obama said more than once.

“I certainly don’t want to go back to the policies of the last four years,” Romney retorted. “It hasn’t worked.”\

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No clear win for Obama in last night’s debate

Forgive me but I didn’t see last night’s debate as a clear win for the president. In my opinion, Obama and Romney were pretty evenly matched, while debate moderator Crowley sounded whiney most of the time.

The Washington Post’s Stephen Stromberg was also unimpressed, but he did give the edge to Obama:

President Obama might have saved his campaign at Tuesday night’s presidential debate. Not that his performance was all that great.

At the first presidential debate two weeks ago, Obama seemed prickly and disengaged. This time around, he retired the arrogant grin and delivered his lines with force. He did voters the courtesy of bringing his A game, instead of conceited complacency. Mitt Romney, meanwhile, went from confident and affable two weeks ago to defensive and pushy Tuesday night. He often sounded flustered, even repeatedly arguing petty points of procedure with moderator Candy Crowley. By the end of the debate, members of the

audience clapped after Crowley called Romney on a fact he got wrong.

Obama also did a better job hitting Romney on a few matters of substance. The president calmly added up the numbers in Romney’s mathematically-challenged tax plan, insisting that Romney the investor would never accept such a “sketchy” deal. Romney’s response to the criticism of his numbers was about as convincing as his usually are: “Of course they add up,” he insisted, following that with no plausible reason to believe him.

On substance, however, Obama still only looked great relative to Romney’s unrealistic tax plan. 

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Where's that vision thing in the 2012 campaign?

As the 4th of July approaches during the lackluster 2012 campaign, Drew Western at the LA Times points out that neither Obama nor Romney offers an inspiring vision to disheartened Americans:

Americans today aren't interested in slogans and sound bites. They want the candidates to offer them a vision, but so far neither Mitt Romney nor President Obama has done so.

Read the entire column here.

The “unspeakably boring election so far”

2008: McCain vs. Obama.

2012: Romney vs. Obama.

Confession: when I read Roger Simon’s post at Politico this morning titled “The ‘meh’-ing of the president,” I had to Google the meaning of  'meh' in the urban dictionary, and I quote: “An interjection used to imply indifference towards a subject; ‘verbal shrug’.

Well, yeah, the 2012 presidential campaign is boring, but not more so, I would argue, than the general election became in 2008 after the Democratic primary ended, and we were subjected to the sparring between Obama and McCain, spiced up occasionally by Biden’s gaffes and Palin’s naïve pizzaz.

Anyway, Simon’s injection of humor into the boring, if not tragically uninspiring, presidential campaign of 2012 between Obama and Romney offers momentary relief and encourages reflection on our choices this November. Simon asks:

Where is the fun? Where is the excitement? Where is the sheer heart-pounding, loin-stirring, thrill-going-up-the-leg tingle that is the hallmark of a U.S. presidential race?

Nowhere. The New York Times Magazine made it official Sunday on its “Meh List,” which each week catalogs those aspects of American life that are unspeakably boring.

And there it was at No. 3: “The election so far.”

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Progressive ideas off the table during 2012 campaign debates?

Blogging at the Christian Science Monitor, Robert Reich offers a disheartening forecast of the coming 2012 presidential race between either Romney or Perry and incumbent Obama (emphases mine):

Whether it’s Romney or Perry, he’s sure to attack everything Obama has done or proposed. And Obama, for his part, will have to defend his positions and look for ways to counterpunch.

Hence, the parameters of public debate for the next fourteen months.

Within these narrow confines progressive ideas won’t get an airing. Even though poverty and unemployment will almost surely stay sky-high, wages will stagnate or continue to fall, inequality will widen, and deficit hawks will create an indelible (and false) impression that the nation can’t afford to do much about any of it – proposals to reverse these trends are unlikely to be heard.

Neither party’s presidential candidate will propose to tame CEO pay, create more tax brackets at the top and raise the highest marginal rates back to their levels in the 1950s and 1960s (that is, 70 to 90 percent), and match the capital-gains rate with ordinary income.

You won’t hear a call to strengthen labor unions and increase the bargaining power of ordinary workers.

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