I'd wager that few if any of the regular readers of this blog are Republicans or Romney supporters.  And I hope that if any were, after last night's debate, they've seen the light.  The first debate was too depressing to blog about, but last night President Obama "showed up" and "brought his game"--pick your own cliché.  It was an exciting, often tense encounter with the President clearly scoring many unanswered points.  (Whenever a writer uses 'clearly' or 'obviously,' a reader can conclude that the writer isn't going to bother to prove his/her points and that what's clear to the writer is likely to be less so to many readers.)  The 24-hour-a-day pundits tell us that who "wins' the debate is a matter of style.  I've heard newspeople, as well as spokespeople from both parties (including DNC Chair, Howard Dean) say that if you want to know who won, you should turn off the sound and watch the body language.  Really?  Wouldn't that be like a judge telling the jury not to listen to testimony, but just to watch the lawyers' body language?  But given that criterion it seemed to me that Romney, trying to follow up on his performance in the first debate, came out punching, but that he was too aggressive and seemed arrogant as he tried to silence both Obama and Candy Crowley.  After that, I thought he sagged a bit, stumbled over many responses, and looked stiff and uncomfortable.  He failed--not that I was sorry to see this--to capitalize on many opportunities (he brought up the Canadian pipeline a couple of times, but didn't really make a clear point, especially for the undecided, i.e., low information, voters.  According to this morning's news reports, he did provide the unintentionally funny meme for this debate with his "binders full of women."  More damaging, I thought, was that after 90 minutes in which President Obama had failed to bring up Romney's remark about the 47% who see themselves as victims and about whom he doesn't need to worry, Romney gave the President an opening by using his last two minutes to talk about his concern for 100% of Americans.  Obama, of course, finally pounced.  Romney had opened the door.

Romney began once again by trying to be specific with his five-point program (Obama said it was a one-point program: protecting the advantages of the very rich).  But his points--cut taxes, get tough on China, etc.--have nothing of the specific about them.  I thought there were two especially telling moments: one was when a questioner said that Romney had said he would pay for his tax cuts (his proposals don't even come close) by eliminating or reducing deductions.  She asked which of, say, the mortgage deduction, charitable contributions, medical expenses, and educational expenses he would eliminate.  As he has done for the last five years, he refused to specify any of these.  Instead, he said he'd pick an "imaginary number" as a sort of bucket into which people could lump deductions.  He chose $25,000.  But Presidents don't get to choose imaginary numbers, and neither should someone who's running for President.  Who knows how close to that number an actual proposal might be?  And how can any of us figure out how such a number might affect us?  (Plus, he ought to take a math course and learn what an imaginary number really is.)  The second moment was when Crowley tried to ask a question about in the off chance his numbers didn't add up, a question that was going to lead to whether he would reconsider any increase in taxes, he interrupted her to say that we should trust him, that the numbers did add up.  Trust him I don't.

Mainly, his argument during the night was that the recovery hasn't been strong enough, coupled with an endless repetition of the same numbers about the past four years that he used in the first debate and that surely numbed the listeners by his third or fourth listing. 

What was interesting was also what was missing from the debate, an indication of how far right the country has moved.  There was no mention of the environment, climate change, or global warming.  None.  On either side.  The social issues that so dominated the Republican primary were virtually absent.  The Republican party platform's opposition to any government money for contraception arose, but Romney had only a feeble response.  Obama scored points on his signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (although again I'm not sure how much low information voters know about the case and the ridiculous Supreme Court decision that followed); Romney had no response except for his "binders full of women."  There was no discussion of the unconscionable consequences of the War on Drugs, which has put 2.3 million Americans, predominately men of color, in jail so that we jail more citizens than any other country, including China, hardly a bastion of liberty, with four times our population.  There was no mention of LGBT issues, including Obama's real contributions to progress, despite both candidates' evasive responses to re-instating the assault weapons ban and focusing instead on vague notions about strengthening the family.  Abortion, and in general women's rights, was never brought up.  Obamacare went virtually unmentioned, as did education except in brief, conventional asides.

The most disheartening part of the debate for me was the discussion of energy policy.  First, when the topic of high gas prices was brought up, why didn't Obama talk about the role commodity speculators play in determining prices?  Or why not talk about the huge government tax breaks (talk about belonging to the 47%!) that ExxonMobil, for example, benefits from and the outlandish profits they are making and sitting on, not investing.  Although the President mentioned new stricter standards for car mileage and talked again about wind, solar, and biofuel possibilities, for the most part he sounded like a defender of the big energy companies.  It was a battle over clean coal (an oxymoron) and how much he had expanded drilling for oil and natural gas (never mind any environmental consequences).  Mitt, of course, would be infinitely worse, but still, I'd like to hear my candidate not sound like a spokesperson for the oil and gas industry.

The big moment for Romney was supposed to be when a discussion of foreign policy arose.  The Republicans have been shamelessly exploiting what happened in Benghazi since 12:01 a.m. on September 12th.  Both parties had agreed to a moratorium on foreign policy criticism on September 11th, so Mitt waited till one minute after midnight to issue a press release, even though at that point he, like everyone else, had no specific information about what had happened.  Obama brought this up, though as an aside, before perhaps his strongest moment of the evening when he said the Republican treatment of what he and his aides had said was "offensive."  It hadn't helped Mitt when Candy Crowley had earlier said that Obama had indeed called the Benghazi attack "terror" the day after it happened.  Though Mitt tried to respond to Obama's indignation, he looked and sounded (I did have the sound turned on) shaken. 

Despite my occasional disappointments in Obama's positions, he came across as strong, clear, and articulate, both in what he said and how he said it.  Game on--again--as the pundits will no doubt say.  After the debate, in a fit of masochism, I turned on Faux news to see how they were going to spin the debate.  (I normally would watch MSNBC, but they've been as obsessed with polling as any network, and I really can't listen to Chris Matthews yell and snort any longer.)  But Fox spent ten minutes punting.  I'm sure they got their act together later, but then it was time for "Chelsea Lately," and I was ready for a break from thinking about politics.

This week's Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir? Award goes to Eddie Munster, aka Paul Ryan.  (The comparison isn't original with me, of course, but once I heard it, I can't get the image out of my mind.)  Ryan "ramrodded," according to the director of a St. Vincent de Paul shelter, his way into the shelter for a photo op despite the fact that the kitchen had closed and there was no one to feed, that the charitable religious organization has a policy against being used for political purposes, and that Ryan stayed for only fifteen minutes, just enough time for the photo op of Ryan's supposedly washing pans that looked suspiciously as if they were already spotless.