Under The Hammer

What a difference one debate makes. Last week people kept asking me if I thought there was a chance Mitt Romney could still win. This week people are talking about Romney winning all the swing states, which is what two university professors from Colorado predicted back in the summer.

Romney won the debate, which should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Romney had, according to one count, 22 debates during the Republican presidential primary, and at every one the other candidates were after him because he was perceived as the front-runner. He may not have been the best debater going in, but practice makes perfect, and if you watch his performances in the final debates, he was impressive.

President Barack Hussein Obama by comparison was not impressive in the debates with Sen. John McCain. He was more impressive than McCain, but that is an extremely low standard. Obama didn't wow people with his debate skills during the 2008 Democratic primary.

Since being elected he has held fewer press conferences than even President George Walker Bush. He hasn't done many interviews where he was asked substantial questions, preferring to appear on shows like The View and The Late Show with David Letterman.

My goodness, this is a man who used teleprompters to speak to kids in an elementary school.

But I think one of the major factors in the Romney-Obama debate that gave Romney a huge advantage was the fact that many people for the first time were seeing Romney without the press filters. I remember seeing Romney in High Point in August. He seemed personable, very comfortable in front of the crowd and a good speaker. He was not at all what I had been lead to believe he was by the mainstream media, which always talk about how stiff and socially awkward he is. He dresses well and he is a 60-something grandfather, so he is not as informal as a 20-year-old in a T-shirt, but we don't want a 20-year-old to be president, which is why the Constitution forbids it.

The mainstream media has focused on Romney's gaffes and the times when he has not been at the top of his game.

Isn't it incredible, the mainstream media could put Vice President Joe Biden's gaffes above the fold day after day, but those are largely ignored or reported as an aside. Biden, if you read what he has actually said out on the campaign trail, appears to be a complete buffoon or suffering from some dementia or both. One of the last times he was allowed to sit down for a nationally televised interview he announced the president's decision to support gay marriage before the president.

In the debate, just as Romney gained by being himself, Obama lost big time by being himself. How many times have most people seen Obama speak without a teleprompter? He has to give press conferences without a teleprompter, but he sticks very close to his friends in the media. The White House knows what questions some reporters will be asking in advance and those are the ones who get called on.

I remember the first time I saw Obama give a speech with teleprompters and I was shocked at how bad he was because all I had heard was what a great speaker he was, and I didn't see it. Obama reads from a teleprompter in a weird kind of singsong that the mainstream media have decided is the epitome of great speaking. But if Obama were a Republican the mainstream media would report that he reads from a teleprompter in a weird kind of singsong that could lull tired reporters to sleep if they weren't careful. Take away the teleprompter and you have what you had in the Oct. 3 debate – a man who really doesn't have much to say but spends a long time saying it.

People expected Romney to be much worse than he really is because of the press, and expected Obama to be much better because of the press. The importance of presidential debates cannot be exaggerated. Campaign events can be staged. In fact, whenever possible they are as carefully staged as any Broadway show. But the campaigns cannot control the debate stage. They have to accept what they get, and what you see is what you get.

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The liberal media are upset because some of the more self aware among them just realized that they have been working hard to help Chauncey Gardiner get reelected president. Chauncey Gardiner is the character in the novella Being There by Jerzy Kosinski, and is played in the movie by Peter Sellers. Gardiner was a man who had spent his entire life in the courtyard garden of a big city mansion. When the wealthy owner dies it is learned that this man, whose name is actually Chance, has no employment history and, according to the government, doesn't exist. He has never left the garden and the mansion, and everything he knows about the outside world is from watching television. He is forced to leave the garden and, by accident, becomes the protégé of another wealthy man. Because he only speaks in platitudes about the garden, which is all he knows, his mentor, the media and the president decide he is a genius.

It pretty much describes Obama, except there is no evidence that Obama knows anything about gardening. Obama speaks in platitudes, which the media reports as brilliant. Obama tried to go after Romney for not having a plan, but Obama's plan for the country the first time he ran was "Change." What kind of plan is that? He can't run on that plan again because most Americans don't like the change that he has brought to the country, and he is the president.

Obama's plan for the next four years is "Forward." You have to give him credit. "Change," and the long version, "Change you can believe in," was a pretty good plan for a challenger, but would not be good for an incumbent. But who can argue with "Forward"? In fact, you have to go forward; there is no reverse in life. You just keep marching forward whether you want to or not. So what Obama is saying in his second term is, if you elect me, the country will keep moving forward deeper into the 21st century, and that is certainly a promise that he can keep. Of course, some naysayer might mention that even if Obama is not elected the country will move forward into the 21st century at exactly the same rate.

But Obama is not saying much else, which is one reason he had such a bad debate. Two other reasons are that people do not like Obamacare, which is his signature program, and nobody likes the state of the economy, which four years ago Obama promised to get rolling. He has certainly spent enough money to do something, it just hasn't worked.

As Romney reminded Obama, when during the debate Obama said he was going to cut the deficit, he's been president for four years and the deficit is more than double what it was under Bush. Obama said he would cut it in half but he must not be good with fractions because instead of dividing it by two he multiplied it by two.

Speaking of that, I love the fact checkers who note that Obama did not double the deficit because it was over $1 trillion in 2009. But evidently the fact checkers were not given a calendar because Obama was president for most of 2009, and one of the first things he did after being sworn into office was spend about a trillion on the stimulus plan where he planned to put the money into "shovel ready" government projects only to discover that there is no such thing.

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Obama had his chance to get before the American people and, unfiltered, tell them what he was going to do for the economy. The result was the disastrous debate where the American people who were watching discovered that the president has no plan and really isn't very interested in the economy or jobs or much of anything other than his anniversary.

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The mainstream media made the mistake of believing what they had been writing for the past four years. They had written time after time about how wonderful Obama was, and now on national television they saw the reality of what Obama is. One of the keys for politicians is not to believe their own press releases. It goes doubly for the folks writing those press releases.

The mainstream media couldn't cover up for Obama because it was too much, too bad and too public. Plus they were caught off guard. If they had not believed their own lies they would have expected Obama to do poorly and could have been prepared. Remember, Obama flew to Copenhagen to beg the International Olympic Committee to choose Chicago for the Olympics. His friends in Chicago would have made billions of dollars if it had been chosen, but instead Chicago came in last. Obama actually thought that his presence alone would change the vote of the Olympic Committee.

According to anonymous sources, Obama thought he did well in the debate. He didn't fall asleep. He didn't say "pass" on any of the questions and he was up there at the podium being Obama. Really, that should be enough. After all, that was enough for him to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Even the Nobel committee had to admit that he had not done anything to deserve it, except be Obama.

Anonymous sources also said that he refused to prepare for the debate, and it certainly appeared that way.

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What has Obama done? Obama held cabinet meetings in January and in July. So every six months he holds a cabinet meeting. You might think that Obama would want to get his closest advisers together and get some advice, but evidently he does not.

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Romney made a strong speech about his foreign policy plans at Virginia Military Institute this week. A telling part of the speech is where Romney says, "It is time to change course in the Middle East. That course should be organized around these bedrock principles: America must have confidence in our cause, clarity in our purpose and resolve in our might. No friend of America will question our commitment to support them … no enemy that attacks America will question our resolve to defeat them … and no one anywhere, friend or foe, will doubt America's capability to back up our words."

He also spoke about the importance of getting back in sync with Israel. Romney and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked together in Boston in the 1970s and have been friends ever since. Israel is the most important ally of the United States in the Middle East, and currently we have a president who won't even meet with Netanyahu.

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The New York Times ran a front-page article on the problems with the effort to reduce the calories in children's school lunches to 850 calories without ever mentioning First Lady Michelle Obama. When the plan was touted as brilliant it was Michelle Obama's plan. But when the idiocy of the plan could not even be ignored by The New York Times, it suddenly had no connection to the White House.

That is simply dishonest. And I know the first lady doesn't have the power to implement any plan. But Lady Bird Johnson is still known for her beautification efforts and Laura Bush for reading, while Hillary Clinton is known for not baking cookies and for her failed health care initiative. Michelle Obama has made nutrition and childhood obesity her issues, and in particular this federal regulation on school lunches. It is her program and was widely recognized as such until people all over the country realized how stupid it is for someone in Washington to decide what is going to be served in school lunches all over the nation.

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More information is coming out about the security situation in Benghazi leading up to the attack on the American compound that resulted in the deaths of American Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Stevens had asked for increased security. He had reported that he had concerns about the safety of American personnel. But instead of getting more security the State Department pulled out a team that had been protecting Stevens.

It is a tragedy that for the first time since James Earl Carter was president that a US ambassador has been killed in the line of duty, but at this point nothing can be done about that. What can be done and what isn't being done is the US could investigate what happened and go after the people who did it. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents were not allowed to visit the site for over three weeks, and during that three week period the site was not secure, which means all sorts of people sifted through the stuff that was left, and a CNN reporter even found a journal kept by Ambassador Stevens.

We are supposed to believe that the United States of America doesn't have enough personnel to secure a State Department compound and keep looters away from American possessions?

Without an investigation and evidence of who committed this crime, how can the US make certain those people who attacked and killed Americans on what is internationally recognized as American soil are punished?

Has Obama taken any action to ensure that the people who did this are brought to justice? If he has, then he is being very quiet about it.