Dispatch #21

Our president, who has a gift for words, for public speaking, and a reputation for “cool” performed rather miserably in the first presidential debate this past Wednesday night. Casual at the start, he struck me as ill-prepared, unfocused, disjointed, the result, I think, of being over-confident and too comfortably ahead in the polls. Earlier in the week, Republican money was reportedly shifting to races in the House of Representatives, more or less conceding that Obama would win the presidential election. When Mitt Romney presented as intelligent and spirited and agreeably moderate, addressing himself and challenging the most intelligent person in the room, the president, instead of trying to speak directly to the American people, he came off quite positively, as if there were a real live candidate in there somewhere under that perfect suit and haircut and not a walking first-class gaffebot. I had begun to wonder about Romney’s fundamental competence prior to the debate. After it, I’m reassured that he has a fundamental political competence, greater than that of George W. Bush certainly, but Romney’s competence is more gubernatorial, governmental, and less electoral. You need both to become president. On Wednesday night, for the first time, the American people got the sense that Mr. Romney might have enough of what it takes of the latter.

That said, it’s too late. Wednesday night will be the high point of the Romney campaign. If the unemployment numbers reported this morning had been terrible, he might have been able to build on his success last night, but the jobless rate fell below 8% for the first time in four years, to 7.8%. Not a great number, of course, but moving, now visibly to the electorate, in the right direction. The stock market (the Dow) rose above 13,500, and consumer confidence has similarly been on the rise.  So that, Romney’s excellent impression will help close the gap, make the contest as close as it should be and should have been from the outset, but it won’t be enough. The Obama campaign will make the necessary rhetorical “adjustments” to their message, and in the end, these debates will be part of the normal Tocquevillian “froth and stir” of the electoral process.