Void for vagueness

Vague Space– Stephen Malkmus

Romney certainly won the debate as a debate. Stylistically, he simply looked and sounded better – pressing his points and speaking clearly forcefully. In terms of content, he won the debate in the sense that he made a number of outrageous statements which Obama failed to deal with. And even when Obama did press his case, he didn’t do so in the context of the debate very well.

That is: he seemed to believe that Romney was obviously stuck defending his policies and ideas of the past 18 months. But the Romney who was on the stage kept claiming that he had nothing to do with those things. Now you and I, avid followers of politics that we are, know how dissembling Romney was being. But the average viewer: probably not.

For my debate friends, I think what we saw last night was Romney as a K debater. He was highly critical of Obama’s plan but categorically refused to state clearly what he would actually like to replace it with. He represented far right principles, but did so in a fashion that claimed to capture all the benefits of mainstream liberalism, while somehow evading all its supposed problems (in a series of 2NC floating PICs). By far, his biggest tactic was: ‘that’s not my Zizek.’ Obama’s accurate descriptions of Romney’s policies didn’t stick very well because Romney just kept asserting that there was no link.

Now, Obama’s best attacks were focused here: pointing out the voodoo math in Romney’s tax plans, the intrinsic vagueness of ALL Romney’s policy proposals, the inanity of Romney’s attack on Obamacare, etc. Even so, it took until the very end for this to develop into a real theme. If Obama had been more forceful at consistently identifying the problem of vagueness, this might have ended up being a bigger story coming out of it. It still might be, of course, and if the Obama campaign knows what they’re doing (which they do), they will press this hard over the coming weeks.

My takeaway from the debate is that Romney will certainly get a bump, and maybe even a big one. The polls that come out over the next week will tighten a lot, and we may even start to see a couple which put Romney in the national lead. But I also think there will be some long-term danger for Romney in all of this. Winning the optics last night was huge for him, and made it worth it, but it did come at the cost of saying quite a few things that will put him in hot water.

For example, the far right can’t have been excited about Romney basically conceding ‘yeah, I won’t actually push for tax cuts unless they can be offset’ (which they obviously can’t be). Romney’s attempt to say ‘no link’ to the fact that repealing Obamacare will crush people with preexisting conditions was a blatant and flagrant lie. And if Team Obama go after this, they can convincingly argue that the whole Romney health care house of cards necessarily collapses when subjected to the slightest bit of scrutiny.

The basic Obama theme needs to be: “promises are easy and Governor Romney is wonderful at telling people what they want to hear. But governing is hard, and when the rubber meets the road this stuff all has to add up. People need to EARN your trust that they will have your interests at stake once they take on the job. Otherwise, all the sacrifices will consistently hit you. You have to choose in this election whether you want to support the candidate who cares about YOU or the candidate who only cares about your VOTE.”