Obama searches for missing mojo
Excuses multiply, aide vows changes after poor debate performance
WASHINGTON— Democrats can scramble it, boil it, fry it or bake it with brie, no matter. The fact that Barack Obama laid an egg on the debate stage is irrefutable. And now Team Obama has it all over their faces as they work to undo the presidential damage done Wednesday night in Colorado.
As sober, second-day judgment took hold, the excuses for No-Mojo Obama multiplied.
He was tired. He was distracted by the unknowable classified files that are a constant burden of the Oval Office. He was thrown off his game by Mitt Romney’s terrorist attack on Big Bird. He was oxygen-depleted by Denver’s thin, mile-high air.
Whatever. The chin-up, chest-out Obama people remember from 2008 was on Wednesday night a passive, head-down supplicant — a bystander, almost, to Romney’s 90minute drive-by looting of centrist policies that were quickly taken apart by the fact-checking hordes, if not Obama himself.
The performance was all the more jarring given how quickly Obama righted himself.
Returning Thursday to the campaign trail, the U.S. president brought his mojo this time — passionate, feisty, funny and, finally, calling out Romney for bending the truth.
“When I got onto the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney,” Obama said. “But it couldn’t have been Mitt Romney, because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that fa- vour the wealthy. The fellow on stage last night said he didn’t know anything about it.” Obama was speaking to 12,000 people in Denver, rather than the estimated 60 million who tuned in the night before. David Axelrod, Obama’s senior aide, acknowledged the difference, promising strategic adjustments are coming. “We are going to take a hard look at this and we are going to have to make some adjustments as to where to draw the lines in these debates and how to use our time,” Axelrod told reporters. While Democrat loyalists bemoaned missed opportunity — the chance for a knockout punch against Romney — others soothed themselves with fresh polling numbers, including a midday Gallup tracker indicating the president’s approval rating has now surged to 54 per cent. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken after the prime-time faceoff, however, offered better news for Romney, with 51 per cent of viewers saying they view Romney positively. Obama’s favourabiity rating was unchanged at 56 per cent. But surveys have yet to measure the full impact of the first debate and there remains a broad expectation Obama’s advantage is likely to narrow in the stretch toward Nov. 6. Romney’s surrogates made the most of Romney’s afterglow, some perhaps too much. John Sununu, the hard-talking former New Hampshire governor, said Obama’s debate performance “revealed his incompetence, how lazy and detached his is, and how he has absolutely no idea how serious the economic problems of this country are.” On Obama’s claim of two Romneys, America’s fact-checking monitors largely agree. The GOP standard-bearer tacked to the middle Wednesday on file after file, from taxes to debt to government regulation to health care, presenting himself as a reasonable pragmatist in sharp contrast to the red-meat orator of the earlier primary debates.
It was Romney’s Etch-a-Sketch moment, in the eyes of many, one built on policy vagaries that went largely unchallenged by Obama.
But with fewer than five weeks to go, there also appear to be two Obamas. They may both believe the same thing, but only one gets it across with any semblance of fire in his belly. And Mojo Obama, whether by accident or design, didn’t show up on Wednesday.
Among the cavalcade of partisan talking heads, MSNBC’s Crystal Ball the unabashedly left-leaning MSNBC called a time out on the Democratic hand-wringing, telling viewers to “Just chill out.” Obama may have been “meh” in debate but the president left no catastrophic sound bites behind for the Romney campaign to feast upon, said Ball. “This too shall pass.”