Analysis: Mitt Romney's guns go silent during presidential debate
For the last six months Mitt Romney has been out on the campaign trail loudly accusing Barack Obama of “leading from behind” - of failing to show leadership commensurate with America’s pre-eminent position on the world stage.
5:24AM BST 23 Oct 2012 -- Source
But last night it was Mr Romney who failed to show leadership on the much smaller stage of the third presidential debate in Boca Raton, Florida, delivering a strangely muted performance that was reminiscent of Mr Obama’s own disastrous first debate in Denver.
So intent was Mr Romney in appearing presidential and in countering the Democrat charge that he and his team of Bush-era advisers were reckless war-mongers, that Mr Romney at times failed to advance any foreign policies at all.
Time and again, he stressed how much he agreed with President Obama – on containing Iran, solving Syria and on backing Israel – while at the same time diving for cover into the more familiar territory of domestic economic policy at every opportunity.
Even on the issue of the storming of the US consulate in Benghazi last month, where Mr Romney has recently tried to attack Mr Obama and was given a free shot by the moderator’s opening question, the Republican ducked the opportunity to engage.
Instead he spoke of improving “gender equality” in the Middle East, providing “better education” and the need to “help these nations create civil societies”, which seemed suddenly at odds with the nostalgic stump promises to build more battleships and bombers and restore the Reagan doctrine of “peace through strength”.
If this sudden attack of high-mindedness by Mr Romney was intended as some kind of a peace-offering – an invitation to a mature debate - then Mr Obama was obviously in no mood for a truce.
He displayed a cruelly intimate knowledge of Mr Romney’s rather scatter-gun pronouncements on foreign affairs, from labeling Russia as America’s “number one geopolitical foe” to arguing for more troops in Iraq and flip-flopping on the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“When it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s,” Mr Obama said.
When the subject of battleships came up, Mr Obama pointed out that America already spends more on defence that the next ten nations combined – including China, Russia France, Britain – and that in any case, if more money needed spending, it certainly wasn’t on battleships.
Out on the stump, Mr Romney likes to say America has the smallest navy since 1916 – although he omits to say that the US fleet is bigger than the next 13 navies combined – but Mr Obama schooled that in modern warfare the threats will come not by sea, but in cyberspace and space itself.
“You mention that we have fewer ships than we had in 1916. Well, Governor we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because that nature of our military has changed,” he said, pressing his own credentials as commander-in-chief.
“We also have these things called ‘aircraft carriers’ that planes land on, and ships that go under water – nuclear submarines. So the question is not a game of battleships, but what are our capabilities…and how we are going to meet the best of our defence needs.”
This was a bad night for Mr Romney – as bad, according to the snap polls – as Mr Obama’s night in Denver two-and-a-half weeks ago.
The poll by CBS News found that 53 per cent of people thought Mr Obama had won, while 23 per cent awarded the debate to Mr Romney; some 71 per cent thought Mr Obama would do better in an international crisis, while 64 per cent backed him to do a better job on national security.
This election is being fought on the economy, but passing the "commander-in-chief test" is crucial to broader electability: Mr Romney didn’t disqualify himself, but in the particular battle, he did nothing to cover himself in glory either.
