Needless to say, I thought Barack Obama did a lot better in last night's debate than he did in the first one. Everyone's saying he took the reaction to the first one as a wake-up call and prepped better for this one. That may be so but I thought he was also better-served by the "town hall" format. I think he just related better than Romney does to non-rich people. Romney seemed a bit condescending and obvious with his promise-everyone-a-pony positions.
Like everyone else who wants to see Obama win, I was pleased by the little exchange in which Obama essentially called bullshit on a Romney factual recital — the thing about labeling the Benghazi attack as terrorism. Romney apparently wasn't quite as wrong as he seemed in that exchange. The administration was slow to adopt that as a formal position but he was wrong to suggest Obama hadn't used the "t" word in his Rose Garden speech the next day. The moment was a big win for Obama but I wonder what would have happened if he'd built on it by saying something like this…
You know, governor, I keep hearing these things from you and your campaign about me that I don't recognize. I don't know which Barack Obama you're talking about…maybe the imaginary one Clint Eastwood was debating and blaming for things the Bush administration did. The American people deserve facts, not fibs. We have one more of these debates scheduled. How about if you and I agree to bring in some fact-checkers to keep us both honest? There are all these fine operations out there like PolitiFact or Factcheck-dot-org. Your campaign even cites one of them occasionally when Joe Biden or I get something wrong. Let's invite representatives from one of these services to the next debate and if I say something you think is factually incorrect, you can call on them to arbitrate and I can do the same thing. What do you say to that?
What could Romney have said to that? If he said no, he'd look cowardly. It would be like he'd said, "No, I need my factual distortions to win this election." If he said, "Sure, bring it on," he'd first of all be saying yes to an Obama proposal and a lot of his base doesn't like that. Obama would look like a brave leader and Romney would be setting himself up to be smacked-down again in the next debate on inaccuracies. Obama got some things wrong last night too but he wasn't as bad as his opponent.
Anyway, that's just me musing over something that wasn't going to happen…and even without it, Obama did jes' fine. I still think (a) he's going to win and (b) before he does, we're in for more roller-coaster moments where it looks like he might not.