Confusing Strength with Aggression

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

The vice presidential debate was uniquely important because if Paul Ryan won it or did well, the Romney-Ryan ticket’s momentum would be continued or speed up. If he did not, that momentum would slow or stop. So the night carried implications.

The debate, obviously, was the Republican versus the Democrat, a particular kind of conservative versus a particular kind of liberal, one philosophical approach versus another. Beyond that there was some iconic weight to it. It was age versus youth; full, white-haired man versus lean, black-haired man. Youth is energy—new ideas and new ways. But age can stand for experience, wisdom. Youth can seem callow, confident only because it is uninformed. But age can seem reactionary, resistant to change in part because change carries a rebuke: You and your friends have been doing things wrong, we need a new approach.

Joe Biden had to do what the president failed to do—seem alive, bring it, show that he respects America so much he’d bother to fight for it. Mr. Biden is voluble, sentimental, scrappy. Could he focus his scrappiness enough to deliver targeted blows?

Mr. Ryan had to introduce himself to the American people in a new way—at length, in a contentious environment. He had to communicate: “I haven’t been a national figure long, but I know what I’m doing. I’m not radical or extreme and I’m not here to destabilize, I’m here to help make things safer by putting them on firmer ground.”

History is human; both men had things to prove. Mr. Biden had to show the White House, the Democratic base and himself that he still has it, that he’s not the doddering uncle in the attic. Whatever happens, at almost 70 this is his last grand political moment. Would his career end with a whiff or a hit? And the debate was his opportunity to save Barack Obama. Might that be personally satisfying? Obama staffers are often quietly condescending about Ol’ Joe. What sweet revenge to publicly save the leader of those who privately patronized you. If I read Mr. Biden correctly, this would have crossed his mind.

Mr. Ryan had to show the voters, the GOP and the political class that Mitt Romney did not make a mistake in choosing him. There were other candidates, some impressive. He had to demonstrate that Mr. Romney’s faith was well and shrewdly placed.

So: a pat on the back and a gold watch for the old man? Or a “Thanks for coming in, we’re going in another direction but let’s stay in touch” for the young one?

*   *   *

So, to the debate:

There were fireworks all the way, and plenty of drama. Each candidate could claim a win in one area or another, but by the end it looked to me like this: For the second time in two weeks, the Democrat came out and defeated himself. In both cases the Republican was strong and the Democrat somewhat disturbing.

Another way to say it is the old man tried to patronize the kid and the kid stood his ground. The old man pushed, and the kid pushed back.

Last week Mr. Obama was weirdly passive. Last night Mr. Biden was weirdly aggressive, if that is the right word for someone who grimaces, laughs derisively, interrupts, hectors, rolls his eyes, browbeats and attempts to bully. He meant to dominate, to seem strong and no-nonsense. Sometimes he did—he had his moments. But he was also disrespectful and full of bluster. “Oh, now you’re Jack Kennedy!” he snapped at one point. It was an echo of Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle, in 1988. But Mr. Quayle, who had compared himself to Kennedy, had invited the insult. Mr. Ryan had not. It came from nowhere. Did Mr. Biden look good? No, he looked mean and second-rate. He meant to undercut Mr. Ryan, but he undercut himself. His grimaces and laughter were reminiscent of Al Gore’s sighs in 2000—theatrical, off-putting and in the end self-indicting.

Mr. Ryan was generally earnest, fluid, somewhat wonky, confident. He occasionally teetered on the edge of glibness and sometimes fell off. If I understood him correctly during the exchange on Iran, he seemed to suggest to moderator Martha Raddatz that a nuclear war in the Mideast would be preferable to a nuclearized Iran. Really? That easy, is it? Mr. Biden had one of his first good moments when he said, essentially, “Whoa.” Actually he said war should always be a very last resort, which is always a good thing to say, and to mean.

Because the debate was so rich in charge and countercharge, and because it covered so much ground, both parties will be able to mine the videotape for their purposes. On the attack in Benghazi, the question that opened the debate, Mr. Biden was on the defensive and full of spin. He pivoted quickly to talking points, a move that was at once too smooth and too clumsy. He was weak on requests for added security before the consulate was overrun and the ambassador killed. “We will get to the bottom of this.” Oh. Good.

Mr. Ryan was strong on spending and taxes. On foreign affairs and defense spending, he was on weaker ground. Medicare and Social Security were probably a draw. Mr. Ryan coolly laid out the numbers and the need for change, but Mr. Biden emoted in a way that seemed sincere and was perhaps compelling. He scored when he knocked Mr. Romney for his 47% remarks, saying those who pay only payroll taxes pay a higher rate than many of the rich, including Mr. Romney. Mr. Ryan in turn scored on the unemployment rate in Scranton, Pa., Mr. Biden’s hometown. It is 10%. It was 8.5% when the recession began. “This is not what a real recovery looks like.” Mr. Ryan on abortion was personal and believable. Mr. Biden seemed to be going through the pro-choice motions.

*   *   *

I have just realized the problem with the debate: it was the weird distance between style and content, and the degree to which Mr. Biden’s style poisoned his content.

In terms of content—the seriousness and strength of one’s positions and the ability to argue for them—the debate was probably a draw, with both candidates having strong moments. But in terms of style, Mr. Biden was so childishly manipulative that it will be surprising if independents and undecideds liked what they saw.

National Democrats keep confusing strength with aggression and command with sarcasm. Even the latter didn’t work for Mr. Biden. The things he said had the rhythm and smirk of sarcasm without the cutting substance.

And so the Romney-Ryan ticket emerged ahead. Its momentum was neither stopped nor slowed and likely was pushed forward.

Meaning that things will continue to get hotter. The campaign trail, commercials, all sorts of mischief—everything will get jacked up, cranked up. Meaning the next debate is even more important. Which means, since the next debate is a town hall and won’t be mano-a-mano at the podium, that the third debate, on foreign policy, will be the most important of all.

Ms. Raddatz acquitted herself admirably, keeping things moving, allowing the candidates to engage, probing. There was a real humanity to her presence. We just saw Jim Lehrer beat up for what was also good work. May her excellence go unpunished.

Put a Chair Out

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

A friend in Texas told me of some local difficulties in getting big Romney lawn signs. Its possible there’s been a run on those signs since the first debate, and maybe local GOP organizations are running out. You know what Romney supporters who cant find lawn signs should do? Put an empty chair on the lawn instead. Just one big empty chair. Says it all. Says it better.

Romney Deflates the President

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Out on a limb, where the breeze is best:

The impact of the first debate is going to be bigger than we know. It’s going to affect thinking more than we know, and it’s going to start showing up in the polls, including in the battlegrounds, more dramatically than we guess.

It wasn’t just Mitt Romney’s strong performance. It was President Obama’s amazingly weak one. He’s never been punctured before. But by debate’s end Wednesday night, if you opened the window this is what you could hear: Ssssssss. The soft hiss of air departing from a balloon.

And—amazingly again—he did it to himself. He didn’t fight, he didn’t show, he wasn’t awake and hungry. He just said the same-old-same-old and let it go. He couldn’t even meet Mr. Romney’s gaze, never mind his arguments.

Is all this dispositive? Has it changed everything? No.

Balloons can get patched. Opportunities can be squandered. Luck can turn.

But this whole race is on the move again, it’s in play again, and it’s going to get fun.

But it’s going to get hot, too. And probably dirty.

*   *   *

America got its first, sustained look at the good and competent Mr. Romney. And it really was a first. He wasted his convention but showed up for his debate, and an estimated 58 million people were watching. Many of them were taking his measure for the first time. What did they see? He was confident, gracious, in command of the facts. He looked like a president, acted like one. He was easily the incumbent’s equal and maybe more than that, so he became for the first time a real alternative to the incumbent, a living one, not just a name on a ballot.

He has been painted as Richie Rich, a too-tightly-wound reject from the Republican Animatronic Presidential Candidate Factory. But again, that’s not who he was. He was a normal, smart adult, and he knew things both about America and about public policy. He’s supposed to be extreme, but he was not in the least extreme. He spent his time talking not just to Republicans or conservatives but to the American people, a huge and varied lot. He reminded many of them of something they’d perhaps forgotten along the way: We don’t like the Obama economy! We don’t like ObamaCare! We don’t like not having jobs! Nothing personal, but this didn’t work!

Forced by time constraints to be clear and concise in his statements, he was both. Here we must stop and note: The way Mr. Romney spoke in the debate was the real Romney. The faux-flowery “prairie fire of debt” one we hear on the stump is the not-real Romney. He flowers himself up on the stump because he thinks it makes him sound better. It doesn’t. The real Romney is the one who can communicate. He’s straight and direct and not fancy, forgivably jargony, but worried about America and sincere. That’s the Romney who showed up for the debate. Stay that guy!

*   *   *

All the books being written about the 2012 race will tell us the background and circumstances of Mr. Obama’s surprising and deeply unimpressive performance. For now what can be said is this is how journalists described it in real time: passive, listless, effete, detached, flaccid, dull-brained, disengaged, professorial. The last is unjust. Professors are often interesting. When Mr. Romney gave him the sweet-faced “You’re a cute little shrimp” look, and he gave it to him all night, Mr. Obama couldn’t even look at him. When Mr. Obama stared down and nodded at his notes it looked, as someone observed in an email, like his impersonation of a bored wife. Everything he said—everything—was something you’d heard too many times. Mr. Romney gave the president some openings. The president didn’t take them. Why? It crossed my mind he was playing possum. But possums wake up at some point.

Mr. Obama’s likability numbers are about to go down. It’s going to be a reverse Sally Field: You don’t like me, you really don’t like me.

Jim Lehrer has been criticized as an inadequate moderator. He was old-school and a pro. He didn’t think it was about him. How quaint. He asked questions, allowed a certain amount of leeway to both candidates, which allowed each to reveal himself, and kept things moving. Most of the criticism seems to have come from those who hoped Mr. Obama would emerge triumphant. Mr. Lehrer should not take it personally. Every shot at him was actually a warning shot aimed at the next moderator, Martha Raddatz. She’s being told certain outcomes are desirable.

*   *   *

The next Obama-Romney debate will be different. The same Obama will not show up. He’s been embarrassed. He’ll bring his LeBron. He’ll be tough, competitive, and he’ll go at Mr. Romney professionally and personally: “We know you love cars, you’ve even got an elevator for them!” This is where Sen. Rob Portman, in future debate prep, has to go. He has to play a newly energized and focused Chicago pol. But then he knows that.

Advice to the Romney campaign:

1. There’s no way to know if the debate changed everything but for the next few weeks Pretend it has. Underscore the gain in stature your candidate now enjoys. Makes things new, dress it up.

2. Everyone at podiums. Stop with the rambling man with the cordless mic on the empty stage. Forget the bales of hay and the tired local GOP activists in the background. Keep the candidate looking like a president. Weeks ago you threw together a stage with a podium, flags and deep blue curtains. It was for Mr. Romney’s Libya statement, which flopped. But the setting was good. Get it back.

3. Everyone in suits and ties. Enough with the high-thread-count, open-collar shirts with the sleeves rolled up. The presidency is not a TED conference. Especially for Paul Ryan. You know what we like to see in a 42-year-old man who wants to change a 45-year-old program? Grown-up clothes.

4. Maintain the rhetorical tone and tenor of the debate—sharp but respectful—Debate Romney, not Prairie Fire Romney.

5. Watch out for Big Bird. Putting the merits and realities of overall PBS funding aside, Mr Romney here gave a small gift to the incumbent. Democrats will merrily exploit it. Big Birds will start showing up outside Romney rallies, holding up signs saying “Don’t Kill Me!” Think this through.

6. As things tighten up, they will probably get dirty. It is a matter of conviction in both parties that the other side is more ruthless and brutal in its use of underhanded tactics. Both campaigns have probably been sitting on potentially damaging opposition research. Why? Because they don’t want to win that way. Political operatives say they hate oppo because they hate to lower the tone of the national discourse. The truth is, oppo is bad for business. The press goes into full Lascivious Puritan mode, spreads the dirt and then tries to nail the provider. When everyone knows a strategist won dirty, he becomes controversial, future clients shy away, and the mortgage on the house in Umbria goes unpaid. But losing is even worse for business.

Chicago won’t go quietly. Be ready for trouble and able of rapid response.

The Big Mix

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Sometimes things you’ve long known break through again in a fresh and powerful way, and what you know becomes new again. “Man needs less to be instructed than reminded,” Dr. Johnson said, but it wasn’t really a reminder I got yesterday, it was a sort of revivifier.

I was at the big annual street fair in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Big turnout, beautiful day, many thousands of people clogging Third Avenue from the 60s through the 80s, what looked like more than a hundred booths. The people filling the avenue were an incredible mix—young and old, infants and grandmas, all colors and nationalities, families, kids in groups, all kinds of garb—young Arab women in headscarves and abayas, Italian kids from the old Bay Ridge, elderly Irish women who go to the local evangelical church, young Latinos, tall blond Nordic-looking girls in black suede leather boots, Filipino families. In the beauty shop on 76th Street where my mother popped in to get her hair done everyone spoke Chinese, including a 5- or 6-year-old Asian girl so proud of her new bangs. One booth looked like a gold souk and sold Arab dress. Another sold Catholic saints’ cards, crucifixes and Rosary beads. At the Obama 2012 booth, some members of “Brooklyn Democrats for Change” teased me, gave me an Obama button, and posed for pictures. (No Romney booth, alas.) At another, evangelicals offered a free New Testament, and when I said I already had one, they asked if they could pray for a specific intention. I said yes, my back’s bothering me, and a white-haired woman put her hands on my neck and back, said a prayer and asked for a healing in Jesus Christ’s name. A Mexican woman across the way had a headset on and was telling everyone how to make the best salad ever with her Super-Hyper-Veg-O-Matic. She had a big crowd. Young Asian kids with iPhones were tweeting what they were seeing as they walked behind their grandparents. Two teenage Arab girls were sitting on storage boxes and laughing, and as I walked by I saw they were breezing through pictures on an iPhone and posting them on Facebook.

I’m walking along with my niece and her baby and fiancé, Dominic, and suddenly in some new way it hits me. “The entire political future of America is on this street,” I said.

Everyone different, everyone getting along, everyone feeling free to be who they are but everyone also—you could just kind of see it—feeling free to be different from who they are, too. Everyone selling their wares, not just material ones but spiritual ones. There was a really loud kind of rap group, and I asked who it was because I didn’t get its composition—young black and Hispanic men, a middle-aged white woman. Singers from a local church, I was told. The Knights of Columbus were giving out flyers: Come to the October dinner dance. The Gateway City Church was inviting you to an “Overcomers Meeting . . . a fellowship of men and women who are dealing with alcohol, drugs, nicotine, depression and anxiety, fears, anger, gambling, lust, family problems. . . . All are welcome regardless of religious and spiritual beliefs and persuasions.” An Albanian sect of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was there, too.

Later at a Mexican restaurant, Dominic asked what I meant about the political future being right there on the street. I said we’d walked through the big mix, the big jumble, and if we get it right it will be the big blend. You see the people and the booths and who’s doing business and who’s walking together, and you know what is important to them. Family is important, so is faith, variety is a given, it’s baked in the cake. They want peacefulness, education for their kids, they want to rise, they don’t want crime. They don’t want a dangerous culture, one they have to protect their kids from. They’re like every other immigrant that’s ever been, they don’t want to have government bother them, overregulate them or squish them down, they want everyone to get help if they need it, they want to get good jobs and be free to be who they are and also become who they want to be.

That’s all.

And they are politically up for grabs.

They are not Democrats and Republicans, they are citizens. And who wins them, wins the future. They haven’t inhaled a political persuasion, they’re getting a sense of both parties, they’re meeting them.

And the first thing you do is you don’t slice and dice them: we are one nation, one country, one people. That way the big mix becomes the big blend, as it always has.

And something else: Everything I saw—the good humor, the engagement, the acceptance—kind of suggested we’re getting it righter than we know.

*   *   *

Only as I write do I realize I saw all this just a few miles from Williamsburg, where a little girl named Betty Smith lived at the turn of the last century. She went on to write a great classic, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” about the new immigrants of her day, the Irish and Italians and Germans and Slavs who became: the American people.

2012 Debates: This Is It, Mitt

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

“Governor, the success or failure of your entire presidential campaign will come down to what happens between the hours of 9 and 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 3. We’re at a hinge point in history. It’s not too much to say the future of the American republic depends on how you do in that hour and a half.”

“Um, specifically, what do you want me to do?”

“Be relaxed!”
That’s what’s coming from some of Mitt Romney’s supporters right now—Wednesday night is critical, the last chance, so don’t forget it’s nothing, a walk in the park. He doesn’t strike me as easily given to freak-outs, but if he is, this would be the moment.

Let’s take a different approach.

It is true that the debate has the potential to alter the dynamic of the election. A good or great one, followed up by an improved, more serious campaign, could make everything new again. A bad one would do damage indeed.

But there will be three debates, and it’s possible the truly high-stakes one will be the last, on Oct. 22.

And there are some institutional and personal elements surrounding the Wednesday debate that may well work in Mr. Romney’s favor.

From a canny journalist with a counterintuitive head: “The media will be rooting for Romney.” Two reasons. First, they don’t want the story to end. They’re in show biz: A boring end means lower ratings. Careers are involved! Second, the mainstream media is suddenly realizing that more than half the country (and some of their colleagues) think they are at least operationally in the tank for the president, or the Democrats in general. It is hurting the media’s standing. A midcourse correction is in order, and Wednesday will offer an opportunity: I think it’s fair to say Gov. Romney more than held his own this evening, and a consensus seems to be forming that the president underperformed.

Mr. Romney walks in as the underdog, behind in the polls. He’s not the president, the other guy is. He’s not world-famous, the other guy is. The president is known for smooth presentation and verbal fluidity, Mr. Romney more recently for awkwardisms and gaffes.

It’s good to be the underdog. “Politics is exceeding expectations.”

As the Republican candidate, Mr. Romney is used to being battered about. He can take a shot. But once you’re president, you’re never battered about. The mystique of the Oval Office is too great. People tell you what you want to hear. Everyone’s too easy on you.

President Obama hasn’t been challenged in public in a long time. He hasn’t been challenged in private in a long time. So if Mr. Romney treats him with respect but not deference, if he really engages, challenges, questions and pushes, he just might knock the president off his stride.

There was something Mr. Romney did in the primary debates. When his competitors were answering questions, he didn’t stand at the podium looking distracted. He’d turn and smile at them sweetly and encouragingly, as if he were thinking, “You’re the cutest little shrimp.” No one has looked at Mr. Obama like that since 2003. It’s possible he wouldn’t like it.

Everyone is waiting for the “Are you better off now . . .” question, but that’s a little complicated. No one knew Reagan was going to uncork it in 1980, and so it had a chance to be devastating. This year, everyone knows it’s coming. So maybe it won’t come. Mr. Obama surely will have memorized a response. Or maybe he will bring it up first. “I’d actually like to talk about whether some people are better off now. It’s a complicated question, but teachers and firefighters who’ve kept their jobs because of what we did might say they’re better off . . .”

*   *   *

Mr. Romney should be wondering Which Obama he’ll meet.

More-in-Sorrow-Than-in-Anger Obama? He patiently explains, until your eyes cross, the real facts of the economy and the beginning of recovery, the competing and even contradictory forces that determine outcomes. He speaks in soft, rounded phrases.

Faux-Humble Obama? I’ve made some mistakes, I’ll admit it. I didn’t always do so well explaining exactly what I was doing, in terms of policy, and all the reasons why. I haven’t been perfect, but I wasn’t wrong to help people get through the height of the crisis. I’ve learned a lot, but I didn’t need to be told to save the U.S. auto industry.

Perturbable Obama? This is a proud man. He doesn’t like to be questioned too closely, as he showed when he was pressed on Univision last week.

Rope-a-Dope Obama? As he showed on “60 Minutes,” he can make it up as he goes along when he feels he needs to. If you endlessly correct his numbers, it could leave you sputtering digits, slinging factoids, losing the larger point.

Cool McCool? This Obama is tall, friendly, shows up on “The View” and has a smile so big it wrinkles his nose. But he can refer to himself as “eye candy,” and reminds you of the old McCain commercial: “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world.”

Maybe Mr. Romney will meet all five.

*   *   *

Mitt Romney still sounds, at this late date in the campaign, as if he’s talking to Republicans. But they don’t have to be persuaded, they think Mr. Obama is a disaster and want him out. He should be talking to independents, centrists, suburban women, those who might be won over. A lot of them would be grateful to be impressed.

In that area, an idea. In 1980, a lot of people thought incumbent Jimmy Carter wasn’t cutting it. It wasn’t personal, he just didn’t have the right answers for the problems at hand. But people had real doubts about Ronald Reagan—he was too shoot-from-the-hip, he’d start World War III. These were understandable reservations! He had to prove he was a pair of safe hands.

People think Mr. Romney’s rich, doesn’t understand regular people’s lives. They’re not sure he can turn things around. He has to prove he’s a pair of safe hands.

One way to get at that: People hate it that Washington doesn’t work anymore, that it’s incapable of solving problems, that it can’t even pass a budget. There is widespread knowledge that Mr. Obama, whatever his virtues, doesn’t work well with others—he can’t negotiate, can’t bend them to his will, doesn’t really listen, can’t work it out, can’t win them over. It’s all stasis now. And will be if he is re-elected. The complaint that he is at once convinced, detached and uninterested is heard not only in Washington and among Republicans, but among foreign leaders.

Maybe Mr. Romney can note that he once ran a great state, that he faced a legislature dominated by the other party, that he worked with them, heard them, negotiated with them, and that together they produced a great deal. Even a health-care bill that didn’t tear the state apart, didn’t cause widespread bitterness, didn’t inspire broad public resentment. It was, in these respects, the opposite of ObamaCare. Mr. Romney learned much from the experience about what works locally and can work nationally. It’s actually not a story to avoid, it is a story worth telling.

Romney Needs a New CEO

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

“Nothing is written.” That was T.E. Lawrence to the Arab tribesmen in Robert Bolt’s screenplay, a masterpiece, of “Lawrence of Arabia.” You write no one off. Nothing is inevitable. Life is news—”What happened today?” And news is surprise—”You’re kidding!”

But you have to look at the landscape and see the shape of the land. You have to see it clearly to move on it well.

So here’s one tough, cool-eyed report on what is happening in the presidential race. It’s from veteran Republican pollster, now corporate strategist, Steve Lombardo of Edelman public relations in Washington. Mr. Lombardo worked in the 2008 Romney campaign. He’s not affiliated with any candidate. This is what he wrote Thursday morning, and what he sees is pretty much what I see.

“The pendulum has swung toward Obama.” Mitt Romney has “a damaged political persona.” He is running behind in key states like Ohio and Virginia and, to a lesser extent, Florida. The president is reversing the decline that began with his “You didn’t build that” comment. For three weeks he’s been on a roll. The wind’s at his back.

How did we get here? What can turn it around?

1. Mr. Romney came out of the primaries “a damaged and flawed candidate.” Voters began to see him as elitist, rich, out of touch. “Here the Democrats’ early advertising was crucial.” Newt Gingrich hurt too, with his attacks on Bain.

2. The Democrats defined Mr. Romney “before he had a chance to define himself.” His campaign failed in “not doing a substantial positive media buy to explain who Mitt Romney is and what kind of president he might be.”

3. “Perceptions of the economy are improving.” Unemployment is high, but the stock market has improved, bringing 401(k)s with it.

4. Obama’s approval ratings are up five to six points since last year. He is now at roughly 49% approval, comparable to where President Bush was in 2004.

5. “The president had a strong convention and Romney a weak one.” The RNC failed “to relaunch a rebranded Romney and create momentum.”

6. Team Romney has been “reactive,” partly because of the need for damage control, but it also failed to force the Obama campaign to react to its proposals and initiatives.

7. The “47%” comment didn’t help, but Mr. Romney’s Libya statement was a critical moment. Team Romney did not know “the most basic political tenet of a foreign crisis: when there is an international incident in which America is attacked, voters in this country will (at least in the short term) rally around the flag and the President. Always. It is stunning that Team Romney failed to recognize this.”

But, says Mr. Lombardo, nothing is over, much remains fluid. The president and his campaign know it. “Among likely voters nationally only two-three points separate the two candidates.” The debates are critical. “If Romney clearly wins the first debate” Oct. 3, “he has a good chance of reversing the trajectory of the last three weeks.”

Why? “Because support for Obama remains lukewarm.” That’s why “he is not running away with this thing even after Romney’s myriad stumbles.”

Finally, “the economy is still weak and the jobs report on October 5th will be pivotal. A strong one may ensure an Obama victory. On the other hand, a poor one on the heels of a Romney debate win could re-align this race.”

*   *   *

It is true that a good debate, especially a good first one, can invigorate a candidate and lead to increased confidence, which can prompt good decisions and sensible statements. There is more than a month between the first debate and the voting: That’s enough time for a healthy spiral to begin.

But: The Romney campaign has to get turned around. This week I called it incompetent, but only because I was being polite. I really meant “rolling calamity.”

A lot of people weighed in, in I suppose expected ways: “Glad you said this,” “Mad you said this.” But, some surprises. No one that I know of defended the campaign or argued “you’re missing some of its quiet excellence.” Instead there was broad agreement with the gist of the critique—from some in the midlevel of the campaign itself, from outside backers and from various party activists and officials. There was a perhaps pessimistic assumption that no one in Boston would be open to advice. A veteran of a previous Romney campaign who supports the governor and admires him—”This is a good man”—said the candidate’s problem isn’t overconfidence, it’s a tin ear. That’s hard to change, the veteran said, because tin-earness keeps you from detecting and remedying tin-earness.

There were wistful notes from the Republicans who’d helped run previous campaigns, most of whom could be characterized as serious, moderate conservatives, all of whom want to see Mr. Romney win because they believe, honestly, that the president has harmed the country financially and in terms of its position in the world. They’re certain it will only get worse in the next four years, but they’re in despair at the Romney campaign. Some, unbidden, brought up the name James A. Baker III, who ran Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1984 (megalandslide—those were the days) and George H.W. Bush’s in 1988 (landslide.)

What they talked about, without using this phrase, is the Baker Way.

This was a man who could run a campaign. Twice in my life I’ve seen men so respected within their organizations that people couldn’t call them by their first names. That would be Mr. Paley, the buccaneer and visionary who invented CBS, and Mr. Baker, who ran things that are by nature chaotic and messy—campaigns and White Houses—with wisdom, focus, efficiency, determination and discipline. And he did it while being attacked every day from left, right and center—and that was in the Reagan White House, never mind outside, which was a constant war zone.

Mr. Baker’s central insight: The candidate can’t run the show. He can’t be the CEO of the campaign and be the candidate. The candidate is out there every day standing for things, fighting for a hearing, trying to get the American people to listen, agree and follow. That’s where his energies go. On top of that, if he’s serious, he has to put in place a guiding philosophy that somehow everyone on the plane picks up and internalizes. The candidate cannot oversee strategy, statements, speechwriting, ads. He shouldn’t be debating what statistic to put on slide four of the PowerPoint presentation. He has to learn to trust others—many others.

Mr. Baker broke up power centers while at the same time establishing clear lines of authority—and responsibility. When you screwed up, he let you know in one quick hurry. But most of all he had judgment. He delegated, and only the gifted were welcome: Bob Teeter, Dick Darman, Roger Ailes, Marlin Fitzwater. He didn’t like hacks, he didn’t get their point, and he knew one when he saw one.

A campaign is a communal exercise. It isn’t about individual entrepreneurs. It’s people pitching in together, aiming their high talents at one single objective: victory.

Mitt Romney needs to get his head screwed on right in this area. Maybe advice could come from someone in politics who awes him. If that isn’t Jim Baker then Mitt Romney’s not awe-able, which is a different kind of problem.

Time for an Intervention

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

What should Mitt Romney do now? He should peer deep into the abyss. He should look straight into the heart of darkness where lies a Republican defeat in a year the Republican presidential candidate almost couldn’t lose. He should imagine what it will mean for the country, for a great political philosophy, conservatism, for his party and, last, for himself. He must look down unblinkingly.

And then he needs to snap out of it, and move.

He has got seven weeks. He’s just had two big flubs. On the Mideast he seemed like a political opportunist, not big and wise but small and tinny. It mattered because the crisis was one of those moments when people look at you and imagine you as president.

Then his comments released last night and made months ago at the private fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. Mr. Romney has relearned what four years ago Sen. Barack Obama learned: There’s no such thing as private when you’re a candidate with a mic. There’s someone who doesn’t like you in that audience. There’s someone with a cellphone. Mr. Obama’s clinger comments became famous in 2008 because when people heard what he’d said, they thought, “That’s the real him, that’s him when he’s talking to his friends.”

*   *   *

And so a quick denunciation of what Mr. Romney said, followed by some ideas.

The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him.

My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning.

This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America.

We are a big, complicated nation. And we are human beings. We are people. We have souls. We are complex. We are not data points. Many things go into our decisions and our political affiliations.

You have to be sophisticated to know that. And if you’re operating at the top of national politics, you’re supposed to be sophisticated.

I wrote recently of an imagined rural Ohio woman sitting on her porch, watching the campaign go by. She’s 60, she identifies as conservative, she likes guns, she thinks the culture has gone crazy. She doesn’t like Obama. Romney looks OK. She’s worried about the national debt and what it will mean to her children. But she’s having a hard time, things are tight for her right now, she’s on partial disability, and her husband is a vet and he gets help, and her mother receives Social Security.

She’s worked hard and paid into the system for years. Her husband fought for his country.

And she’s watching this whole election and thinking.You can win her vote if you give her faith in your fairness and wisdom. But not if you label her and dismiss her.

As for those workers who don’t pay any income taxes, they pay payroll taxes—Social Security and Medicare. They want to rise in the world and make more money. They’d like to file a 1040 because that will mean they got a raise or a better job.

They too are potential Romney voters, because they’re suffering under the no-growth economy.

So: Romney’s theory of the case is all wrong. His understanding of the political topography is wrong.

And his tone is fatalistic. I can’t win these guys who will only vote their economic interests, but I can win these guys who will vote their economic interests, plus some guys in the middle, whoever they are.

That’s too small and pinched and narrow. That’s not how Republicans emerge victorious—”I can’t win these guys.” You have to have more respect than that, and more affection, you don’t write anyone off, you invite everyone in. Reagan in 1984 used to put out his hand: “Come too, come walk with me.” Come join, come help, whatever is happening in your life.

You know what Romney sounded like? Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative. But those old operatives, they never know how it works. They knew how it worked for one cycle back in the day.

They’re jockeys who rode Seabiscuit and thought they won a race.

*   *   *

The big issue—how we view government, what we want from it, what we need, what it rightly asks of us, what it wrongly demands of us—is a good and big and right and serious subject. It has to be dealt with seriously, at some length. And it is in part a cultural conversation. There’s a lot of grievance out there, and a sense of entitlement in many spheres. A lot of people don’t feel confident enough or capable enough to be taking part in the big national drama of Work in America. Why? What’s going on? That’s a conversation worth having.

I think there is a broad and growing feeling now, among Republicans, that this thing is slipping out of Romney’s hands. Today at a speech in New York with what seemed like many conservatives and Republicans in the audience, I said more or less the above. I wondered if anyone would say, in the Q&A, “I think you’ve got it wrong, you’re too pessimistic.” No one did. A woman asked me to talk about why in a year the Republicans couldn’t lose, the Republican candidate seems to be losing.

I said pre-mortems won’t help, if you want to help the more conservative candidate, it’s a better use of your time to pitch in with ideas. There’s seven weeks to go. This isn’t over, it’s possible to make things better.

Republicans are going to have to right this thing. They have to stabilize it.

It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one. It’s not big, it’s not brave, it’s not thoughtfully tackling great issues. It’s always been too small for the moment. All the activists, party supporters and big donors should be pushing for change. People want to focus on who at the top is least constructive and most responsible. Fine, but Mitt Romney is no puppet: He chooses who to listen to. An intervention is in order. “Mitt, this isn’t working.”

Romney is known to be loyal. He sticks with you when you’re going through a hard time, he rides it down with you. That’s a real personal quality, a virtue. My old boss Reagan was a little colder. The night before he won the crucial 1980 New Hampshire primary—the night before he wonit—he fired his campaign manager, John Sears. Reagan thought he wasn’t cutting it, so he was gone. The economist Martin Anderson once called Reagan genially ruthless, and he was. But then it wasn’t about John Sears’s feelings or Ronald Reagan’s feelings, it was about America. You can be pretty tough when it’s about America.

Romney doesn’t seem to be out there campaigning enough. He seems—in this he is exactly like the president—to always be disappearing into fund-raisers, and not having enough big public events.

But the logic of Romney’s fundraising has seemed, for some time, slightly crazy. He’s raising money so he can pile it in at the end, with ads. But at the end will they make much difference? Obama is said to have used a lot of his money early on, to paint a portrait of Romney as Thurston Howell III, as David Brooks put it. That was a gamble on Obama’s part: spend it now, pull ahead in the battlegrounds, once we pull ahead more money will come in because money follows winners, not losers.

If I’m seeing things right, that strategy is paying off.

Romney’s staff used to brag they had a lower burn rate, they were saving it up. For what? For the moment when Americans would rather poke out their eyeballs and stomp on the goo than listen to another ad?

Also, Mr. Romney’s ads are mostly boring. It’s kind of an achievement to be boring at a moment in history like this, so credit where it’s due: That musta taken effort!

*   *   *

When big, serious, thoughtful things must be said then big, serious, thoughtful speeches must be given. Mr. Romney is not good at press conferences. Maybe because he doesn’t give enough, and so hasn’t grown used to them, and confident.

He should stick to speeches, and they have to be big—where America is now, what we must do, how we can do it. He needs to address the Mideast too, because it isn’t going to go away as an issue and is adding a new layer of unease to the entire election. Luckily, Romney has access to some of the best writers and thinkers in the business. I say it that way because to write is to think, and Romney needs fresh writing andfresh thinking.

Romney needs to get serious here.Or, he can keep typing out his stray thoughts with Stuart Stevens, who’s sold himself as a kind of mad genius. I get the mad part.

Wake this election up. Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city—don’t they count anymore? A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings. How about: New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice? You say the state’s not in play? It’s New York. Our media lives here, they’ll make it big. How about downtown Brooklyn, full of new Americans? Guys—make it look like there’s an election going on. Because there is.

Be serious and fight.

If you’re gonna lose, lose honorably. If you’re gonna win do it with meaning.

*   *   *

Romney always seems alone out there, a guy with a mic pacing an empty stage. All by himself, removed from the other humans. It’s sad-looking. It’s not working.

Time for the party to step up. Romney should go out there every day surrounded with the most persuasive, interesting and articulate members of his party, the old ones, and I say this with pain as they’re my age, like Mitch Daniels and Jeb Bush, and the young ones, like Susana Martinez and Chris Christie and Marco Rubio—and even Paul Ryan. I don’t mean one of them should travel with him next Thursday, I mean he should be surrounded by a posse of them every day. Their presence will say, “This isn’t about one man, this is about a whole world of meaning, this is about a conservative political philosophy that can turn things around and make our country better.”

Some of them won’t want to do it because they’re starting to think Romney’s a loser and they don’t want to get loser on them. Too bad. They should be embarrassed if they don’t go, and try, and work, and show support for the conservative candidate at a crucial moment. Do they stand for something or not? Is it bigger than them or not?

Party elders, to the extent you exist this is why you exist:

Right this ship.

*   *   *

So, these are some ideas. Others will have more, and they’ll be better.

But an intervention is needed.

The Age of the Would-Be Princips

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

No American leader’s public statements were up to the task or equal to the moment this week. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama were appropriately full of high praise and sentiment for the four U.S. diplomats gruesomely murdered in Libya. The four can’t be praised enough: They put themselves in harm’s way for their country.

But both Mrs. Clinton’s and Mr. Obama’s remarks, after the tributes, were marked by the kind of gauzy platitudes that, coming one after another, make a statement seem off point and odd. Both shied away from central issues. Violence is “senseless,” yes, and we believe in religious tolerance, true. But at the center there was a void, and the void was meaning. What does this mean? What do we do? What can be done? What should be done?

You know what American politicians have gotten too good at? Talking about loss. Eulogizing the irreplaceable.

A little grit, please.

Mitt Romney came under fire from many, including me, for speaking too soon and in a way that was immediately critical of the administration.

Guys, timing. Dignity. Restraint. Tragedy. Painful headlines, brutal pictures. Long view. Bigness. Think it through, take some days, and then come forth with a cool, detailed, deeply pertinent critique that will actually help people think about what happened.

Granted, the U.S. Embassy statement from Cairo was embarrassing, a verbal cringe. It was marred by the baby talk that disfigures our public discourse. We are so sorry if you’re hurting, we’re really sad someone’s hurt your feelings. Maybe we should just give in and reduce our formal communiqués to something more easily tweetable, like emoticons: “America on your feelings and your need to assuage them by murdering our ambassador :-(”

And look, all this did have that special sound of the Obama administration, did it not?

However. The statement was written by a person or persons who no doubt feared they’d be under siege and in fact soon were, and over some idiot’s video. You have to give some room to people in circumstances so frightening and bizarre.

Mr. Romney’s appearance Wednesday morning seemed to me a metaphor for what is not yet right about his campaign. The setting—the deep blue curtains, the American flags, the dignified podium, the handsome straight-backed candidate—was perfect, presidential. The Romney campaign cares a lot about the picture, just as the White House does: Everyone in politics is too visual. But the thoughts, content, meaning—these are given secondary attention, when in fact they are everything. Get that right and all else will follow.

Republican candidates for president labor under a disadvantage, and we all know what it is. Mainstream media is stacked toward Democrats and against Republicans, toward liberalism and against conservatism. That means Republicans who win have to break through the prism with the force of their thoughts, their words, their philosophy. This is hard. The picture is part of it. But the rest is the heart of it.

What is needed from Mr. Romney now, or soon, is a serious statement about America’s role and purpose in the world. If such a statement contained an intellectually serious critique of the president’s grand strategy, or lack of it, all the better. As far as I can tell, that strategy largely consists of spurts of emotion and calculation from his closest aides, and is not a strategy but an inbox.

Mr. Romney might also contemplate this, because it will soon be on the American mind: Our embassies under siege in the Mideast gives us a sense of what a war with Iran would look like. It would be bloody. Not neat, not surgical, but bloody.

The world is very hot right now. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to lower the temperature.

As for Mr. Obama, he didn’t help himself with his snotty comment on “60 Minutes” that Mr. Romney has a habit of shooting first and aiming later. He could have been classy and refused to take a shot. But he’s not really classy that way.

*   *   *

Two closing thoughts, on larger context.

Whatever the exact impact of the anti-Muhammad hate film that went viral, we have entered an age of would-be Princips.

Gavrilo Princip of course was the assassin who killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on June 28, 1914. He was 20, largely friendless and small in stature. He pulled the trigger that killed the archduke which led to the ultimatums that brought the war that misshaped the 20th century. From his act sprang nine million dead, Lenin at the Finland Station, the fall of Russia, the rise of communism, World War II, the Cold War . . .

Maybe all those things would have happened anyway, one way or another. We’ll never know. All we know is how it did begin, with one young man and a gun.

Now in the age of technology, with everything disseminated everywhere instantly, it isn’t one man with a gun but one man with a camera, or a laptop, or a phone.

To be a Princip is to feel power, whatever the cost to others. It is to need to get your point out there, whatever the price others pay. A Princip has a high sense of authority—he is in possession of urgent truths—and no sense of responsibility.

The maker of the videotape that contributed to the rioting in Egypt is a would-be Princip, as is the American pastor, Terry Jones, who burned the Quran.

We are going to have to think about antidotes to and answers for the new Principism. Because it’s not going to go away.

This week I quoted Paul Fussell’s masterwork, “The Great War and Modern Memory.” He spoke of what came to be, in Europe, the enduring symbolic meaning of the summer of 1914, the last summer before the war. It was the best in years, sunny and stormless, and later, in the trenches, the great writers of World War I, Sigfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, would remember it as a demarcation point between innocence and horror. This is comparable to the poignantly beautiful Sept. 11, 2001, a day so clear you could see for miles, a day everyone in New York remembers as a demarcation point between one world and another.

Like many historians and writers on that war, but with greater style, Fussell noted how everyone was expecting something different. No one was expecting what happened. In July 1914, the big desk in the British cabinet room had been strewn with maps on which were marked battle lines for the coming war. It was to be in Ulster, where everyone had long known an Irish civil war was about to break out: “Enter Sir Edward Grey, ashen faced, in his hand the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia.”

Those in American politics have long had their desks strewn with economic reports and unemployment data, because everyone knew the election is about one thing, the economy. There were stories, just before 9/11/12, about how foreign policy had disappeared as an issue. And now this will be, to some serious degree, a foreign policy election. History is a trickster, it never loses its power to take us aback. We know this in the abstract. It’s somehow always startling in the particular.

Eleven/9/11

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

It was a beautiful day, that’s what everyone remembers. So clear, so crisp, so bright. It sparkled as I walked my 14-year-old son out to go to the subway that would take him to his new high school, in Brooklyn. He was now a commuter: a walk to the 86th Street subway station and then the 4 or 5 train downtown near the towers and over the river. That was about 7:30 in the morning. It was beautiful at noon when I went to mass at St. Thomas More church on 89th Street. And between those two events, his departure and the mass, the world had changed, changed utterly. After mass, at the rise of 86th Street, the day was so clear you could see all the way downtown to the towering debris cloud.

But it was beautiful. That was one of the heartbreaking elements.

*   *   *

The things I will never forget. Looking up at a silent TV screen as I returned email at my computer. Seeing a long-distance shot of the World Trade Center with smoke coming out of the side. Putting up the sound. Hearing a food cart vendor with a heavy accent saying to a reporter on the scene: “That was no small plane, that was a big jet, a jumbo jet.” Knowing it was true. Hearing the TV chatter that a pilot might have accidentally hit the tower. Knowing it was not true. Grabbing the phone to call my son’s school to make sure he had arrived, that he’d gotten there safe, that he hadn’t tarried or gotten off downtown to walk around because it was a beautiful day. Busy signal. Again. Busy. Calling a friend whose husband often worked downtown. No, she said, he’s in London. Talking with her as we watched the screen together and then the second plane went in, right before our eyes, and there was no denying what it was. Calling school. Busy. And then the phones went down.

And then the buildings fell. That was the thing, they heaved up and groaned to the ground and brought a world with them. We could have taken it if the buildings didn’t fall. That’s why the day was so uniquely a New York trauma, for all that happened in Washington and Pennsylvania: The buildings went down and we saw it. My friends saw the jumpers, who fled the flames. To this day they don’t talk about it. My friend saw the faces of the passengers on the first plane, so low did they fly by his building. He saw their faces in the passenger windows. He never told anyone about that, including his wife, until two years ago.

Hearing that that 20,000 or 30,000 people might have been in the buildings. Hearing something about the firemen—a lot of them died, a lot of them tried to charge up the stairs to the fire. The man standing on line in Murphy’s Market after mass. He was covered in Pompeii ash. He had walked uptown. He was standing there in shock with a bottle of water and a banana. The bad boys who hung out near a local school and were said to sell drugs: They took their big boom box and put in on the steps so people walking by could sit down and hear what was happening. I sat down and listened and when I left I said, “Thank you, gentlemen,” and they nodded because they knew: They’d been gentlemen.

And, funnily, such a blur of images so vivid that years later you think you actually saw them when you didn’t. A few days after the attack, I read of someone seeing a transit worker or policeman in a car downtown, parked and motionless, and he had on the radio and it was blaring “Heroes,” and he was crying. I remembered it a few years later and found the Peter Gabriel version. “I can remember / Standing by the wall . . . And we kissed as if nothing could fall . . . We can be heroes . . . just for one day.” It still makes me weep, and when I hear it I see the transit worker or cop again, even though I never saw him.

*   *   *

Worried sick about my son and no way to reach him. And then miraculously the dead phone rang, at 3 p.m. My 14-year-old on the line at the phone at the school that was working that moment, other students crowded behind him. I am fine, he said, but we still don’t know everything that happened, tell me what you know. “It was Arab terrorists,” I said. And he muffled the phone and I heard him announce to the kids, “It was terrorism, an Arab group.”

“It appears to be over,” I said.

“The attack is over, it appears to be all over,” he said. On it went as I filled him in and he filled them in. He told them the towers and the Pentagon were hit but not the State Department, that was a rumor. He was calm, collected, in the middle of history.

He told me he would not get home tonight, all the bridges closed and public transportation stopped, he’d stay over, with some Manhattanite students, at a teacher’s house, he’d be home some time tomorrow, he’ll be fine, don’t worry.

He made it home the next day about noon. And he told me what he’d seen. The subway from Brooklyn to the city curved up over the East River, and everyone on it always turned to look at sparkling, majestic downtown Manhattan. And this day they all turned and they saw the dead cloud, the lost empty buildings, and they all went Oh. A long soft sigh: Oooohhhhh.

There is an unwritten story in how brave our children were that day, and have been since, and what that day was to them. But those who were adolescents or early teenagers on 9/11: they never talk about it. They took it all in but they never talk about it.

*   *   *

As for me, I notice that in the early years after 9/11, when they did their replays of the event on the news, I always used to watch with some kind of pain that was being worked out while it was being re-experienced. But now I can’t watch. Because it causes some kind of pain that is not going to be worked out, and that has to do more with what followed that day than the day itself.

But I want to end with the beauty of that day, and a parallel. I have been reading Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory.” He notes that those who were there remembered the summer of 1914, the months just before the start of World War I, as the most beautiful of their lives. Bright, clear, stormless—no sign of the harrowing trenches just around the corner, of the 7,000 a day who would be wounded or killed on the Somme alone, among British troops alone. “All agree that the prewar summer was the most idyllic for many years. It was warm and sunny, eminently pastoral.” For the great writers who would fight the war, it was carefree, innocent. Siegfried Sassoon “was busy fox hunting,” Robert Graves climbing mountains in Wales, Wilfred Owen tutoring French boys in English near Bordeaux. “For the modern imagination that last summer has assumed the status of a permanent symbol for anything innocently but irrecoverably lost.”

Like that beautiful September day, like dawn on September 11, 2001.

*   *   *

So that was my 9/11. The boy who returned, the world that was ended, the pictures that will never leave your mind. Like this one: A few weeks later I was pouring coffee for construction workers at St Paul’s church downtown and a guy came in and introduced himself. He was a member of the Iron Workers Local 40. They were dismantling the bottom of the towers. He read my columns online, he said. He took his coffee and came back later and in his hand was a paper bag and in the bag were a heavy little heart and a heavy little cross, just cut from the north tower. “I want you to have these,” he said. As I write they are on my desk, in front of me, burnt and bent but there.

Everyone Will Watch the Debates

-- The Wall Street Journal:

 

Some preliminary thoughts on the coming presidential debates, the first of which is Oct. 3, in 3½ weeks:

1. People will be watching.  Convention viewership may have been down, but almost every voter who can, will watch at least some of the debates.  Three reasons.  First, nothing else has moved the needle, the race has been neck and neck for months.  Second, a lot of people will use the debates to test and double-test their preliminary judgments.  Is Romney really strong enough for this job?  Is Obama really who I want to stick with?  Third, it’s a contest, it’s combat.  Someone will cross the goal line, one of them will beat the other.  Someone will emerge the champ, or at least an undamaged contender.  Unlike a convention, a debate is something a candidate can win right before your eyes.

So:  everyone will watch.  What do they hope for?  They’d like to think by the end, “That guy is a president” and turn it off and go to bed, resolved.  They will also accept, “My guy didn’t screw up!  It was a tie, but he didn’t lose, I’ll watch the next one.”

2. Everyone says Obama has the advantage because he’s a wonderful debater.  It’s not true.  There’s no evidence he’s ever been a wonderful debater.  He won the election in 2008, so people think, retrospectively, that he was great at debate.  But he wasn’t, he just never lost an inch to John McCain and seemed steadier, less scattered.  But he never said anything interesting.  In all the 2008 Democratic primary season and then in his presidential debates with Mr. McCain, Obama never offered a memorable moment or said a memorable thing, with one exception.  That was when he said, in response to a facetious comment by Hillary Clinton, “You’re likable enough, Hillary.”  And that was memorable, in retrospect, because he let his inner rhymes-with-witch come out.  What Mr. Obama tends to be is unruffled, steady and cool.  But this can also come across as passive, uninterested and unforthcoming.

3. The incumbent labors at a disadvantage in many respects.  The first is that he has a record to defend.  He’s not promising a better future, he’s saying he did a good enough job to merit re-election, which will usher in a better future.  Everyone knows the economic facts:  There’s a lot that needs defending.

Second, all modern presidents are disoriented to some degree by the presidency, and the biggest way they become disoriented is that for 3½ years everyone around them has bowed to them, murmured compliments, been awed by them.  No one ever pushes back hard, puts down, fiercely challenges or insults a president.  Everyone around a president comforts him:  “The problems you face with such steely grace—Sir, I don’t know how you do it.”  This happens not only because White Houses are heavily staffed by suckups, courtiers and frightened people, it’s because White House staffers – and the presidents they serve – now hold too great a historical consciousness of the presidency.  They’re too much in awe of it.  They’ve all read their Lincoln, their FDR.  This man is their Lincoln, their FDR.   He’ll be in the history books.  Anyway, they treat him with much too much reverance and deference.  (With Lincoln, people on the street used to walk right into the house and ask him for a job.  They thought he worked for them!  It helped keep his head screwed on right.  It helped him become: Lincoln.)

What does this mean in terms of debate?  A challenger who pushes back hard, who shows he is not awed, not that impressed, who never crosses the line into rudeness but holds the line on real, sharp disagreement and lack of reverence, can startle the incumbent, rattle his cage, gain an advantage.  Remember when John Kerry went hard after President Bush in the debates in 2004?  Mr. Bush wound up spluttering: “It is hard work, it is hard work!”  Mitt Romney should keep all this in mind.

Does the incumbent have an advantage?  Sure.  Everyone already knows him.  Everyone knows he’s been president the past 3½ years and the world didn’t blow up.  Everyone knows he has a baseline ability to be president because he’s been president.

4. Too much has been made of likability.  Mr. Romney should not be thinking about that.  America is in a crisis.  It needs to get out of it, shake it off, move forward.  Americans want leadership.  What Mitt Romney has to show is command, talent, resolve.  He has to move with firmness, strength.  Americans don’t really want someone they’d like to go out and have a beer with, they want someone who can help them afford a beer.  First things first.   Romney at this point should just forget likability—let’s just say he’s likable enough.  He needs people to see certainty, guts, ability and heft.  Americans are tired of trying to like these guys, they want to respect them.  They’d like to feel honest awe.