Horses and Bayonets

In the 1980 presidential election between Carter and Reagan, the League of Women Voters had attempted to organize three debates between the presidential candidates and one between the vice presidential candidates. After the primaries, John Anderson entered the race as a third party candidate and was invited into the debates. Carter refused to participate if Anderson was included and Reagan refused to participate if he wasn’t. Therefore the first debate was held absent Carter, who hoped Anderson would knock off the almost unknown former governor of California. He didn’t. When Reagan made his statement at the conclusion of the debate, it was masterful and upbeat, speaking of a destiny “to build a land here that will be, for all mankind, a shining city on a hill.” The first debate was a Reagan win.

The wrangling between the Carter and Reagan camps over Anderson’s participation continued until it became necessary to cancel the second debate and the vice presidential debate. Reagan finally relented and the third debate was held on October 28, the last Tuesday before the election without Anderson.

Throughout their debate, Carter was somber, distant, and often preachy. Reagan was sunny, optimistic, even folksy at times. Carter’s solutions involved more government. Reagan’s involved limiting government and reducing taxes. Carter tried to portray Reagan as unsuited to assume the arcane workings of the presidency, a dangerous military hawk, and a radical conservative. He pointed to Reagan’s speeches as proof-texts. Reagan responded in good humor with his famous “there you go again” and “we don't have inflation because the people are living too well. We have inflation because the government is living too well.” Reagan’s debate summation was devastating to Carter as he asked the American people if they were better off now than four years ago, and he pointed out that “if all of the unemployed today were in a single line allowing two feet for each of them, that line would reach from New York City to Los Angeles.”

Reagan won the popular vote by 10% and for every electoral vote Carter got, Reagan got ten.

The 2012 presidential debates occurred in an environment similar to that of the single Carter-Reagan debate. The economy is in the tank with out-of-control spending and a soaring national debt that is 16 times larger than in 1980. While Obama is nationally more popular than Carter at the end of his first term, he is an even more radical big government liberal than Carter. There is no hostage crisis in the Middle East as Carter faced, but we’ve just lost an ambassador and three embassy personnel who were murdered in a terrorist attack that Obama long denied was any more than a spontaneous eruption caused by a video. Most striking is the similarity of the challengers in the debates – both were governors, but relatively unknown on the national stage, both derided as unsuitable candidates by the incumbents.

The Romney campaign did not consult me for ideas concerning its debate strategy but if it had I would have said the goal of the first debate – Round One – should be to put Obama in a hole with his base, the hard left. Knowing the Maximum Leader’s natural arrogance and condescension, he will underestimate Romney, whose fitness for President he holds in low regard, and thus he will more likely come to the first debate less prepared than he will be for the other debates. If the outcome of Round One is at least a draw or better for Romney, Obama will be forced to excel in the remaining debates. It’s unrealistic to expect a knockout, I would have counseled, but go into Round One loaded with facts and deliver them in a staccato manner that puts Obama on his heels and makes the broadcast audience sit up and take note that, hey, this Romney guy is a player!

Assuming the Romney campaign was foolish enough to ask my advice on the debate strategy for Round Two, I would have said that, after so strong a showing in the first debate, Romney’s goal is don’t lose your base with a poor performance. The better-than-expected first debate performance finally got the demoralized Romney base fired up after a summer of grousing about campaign mismanagement and sagging poll numbers following the Republican National Convention. So go into Round Two prepared with talking points on your domestic policy agenda, but understand that Obama’s somnambulistic first debate performance won’t be repeated. So don’t let him do to you what you did to him and lose your base. Obama, on the other hand, must reassure his base by being very aggressive – a turn-off for the Independent voter. The enthusiasm advantage has stoked the Republicans, the poll numbers are rising, so even a draw will keep Obama from gaining ground and force him to use the third debate to continue propping up his base rather than appealing to the center.

The second debate was a draw or a modest Obama win. Romney didn’t expect he’d have to debate Obama and the moderator, Candy Crowley, and that was a turn-off to people who believe the media are biased and it didn’t help Obama with the Independent voters. Romney lost little or no ground as evidenced after the second debate by the sheer panic among the mainstream media. Even with unblushingly biased polling, the media couldn’t get their guy out of the margin of error – let alone get him in the lead.

Now comes the third debate. Surely the Romney camp would have come to its senses and not asked my advice again. But if they had, I would have said this. Look; Obama is desperate, his base is still shaky and lacking enthusiasm, he hasn’t pulled away from Romney in the polls, this is his last chance to sway the Independents and undecided voters in a side-by-side comparison, and the unfolding Libyan debacle threatens to engulf his campaign in a cover-up scandal. Romney’s goal in the foreign policy third debate is not to score points with his base, which is secure, it is to appear presidential to the undecided and Independent voters. Americans, after all, aren’t that interested in foreign policy, they just want to be assured that Romney has a grasp of it. He doesn’t have to be as granular as Al Gore in 2000 who knew the names of the leaders of all 192 countries in the world as well as the names of their wives, children, and pets. He can’t display declarative stupidity as Gerald Ford did by asserting that Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination in the 1976 election. His Iran policy can’t scare voters into thinking he would blow up the world as Barry Goldwater did in suggesting the use of tactical nuclear weapons to end the Vietnam War in the 1964 election. Look presidential, I’d say, and don’t go for a knockout punch. Win the race rather than the debate.

Well, Romney took my advice and it frustrated the dickens out of the base when Obama served up several hanging curve balls that Romney didn’t swing at. Romney shook off Obama’s attempts to shoehorn him as a bomb thrower, (“we can't kill our way out of this mess”), an amateur (“I had the chance to be governor of a state … four years in a row, Democrats and Republicans came together to balance the budget”), and he shook off Obama’s many attempts to attack Romney which he fended off by reminding the audience that the incumbent had no record that he can run on.

Early in the campaign, it became patently obvious that the Obama strategy was to deflect attention away from the sorry state of the economy and the waning influence of the US in the Middle East by painting Romney as not ready for prime time. Romney had a record as a governor, a turnaround manager of the Olympics, and a successful business man. Given his own record, Obama had to turn these achievements into negatives and create doubts about Romney’s suitability as president and allege a bias toward the rich. The debates were his last chance and he failed.

Obama used the third debate to reach out to the undecided and Independents by portraying himself as the seasoned political executive versus the novitiate parvenu. “One thing I’ve learned as Commander-in-Chief,” he began one strutting assertion. “I know you haven't been in a position to actually execute foreign policy …” he moon-walked his soliloquy on the fine points of foreign policy – big talk from a community organizer whose only foreign policy experience prior to his election was to have eaten at the International House of Pancakes, paraphrasing Pat Buchanan.

People with Queeg-like personality disorders like Obama’s have to remind themselves of their self-worth by depreciating the worth and accomplishments of others. Under stress they lose their sense of equanimity as Captain Queeg did on the Caine mutiny witness stand. This causes them to say some truly stupid things like “you didn’t build that [business]” and “you’ve made enough money,” which usually return to haunt them as those statements did. Give them enough time and rope and they always hang themselves. And that is exactly what Romney did in the third debate. Be patient. Be a tar baby, letting Obama get stucker and stucker as he punched away. Smile at verbal abuses, although at one point Romney had to remind Obama that “attacking me is not an agenda.”

Then, voilà, Romney said, “Our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We're now down to 285. We're headed down to the low 200s” and Obama went for it like a mouse after cheese:

I think Governor Romney maybe hasn't spent enough time looking at how our military works. You — you mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets — (laughter) — because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so the question is not a game of Battleship where we're counting ships. It's what are our capabilities.

No doubt Obama thought he’d just had his “you’re no John Kennedy” moment, but Romney had played Obama like a fiddle, and His Immanence came off in this exchange as snarky, little, and condescending. Whatever bridges he had built during the debate to the voters on the sidelines, they probably collapsed with that remark.

After that the line, “horses and bayonets”, began trending on Twitter. "So much sass I was not ready to handle," one online comment read. Web searches for “bayonets” rose 7,215%, according to Google. Big Bird was Obama’s infantile response to the first debate, women and binders was the best he could muster from the second debate, now comes horses and bayonets. He hasn’t heard the last of it. Presidents don’t talk that way.

If you were a Martian who attended the three debates, you’d assume that Romney was the incumbent and Obama was the challenger – probably doubly so in the third debate. Romney got the bump in the polls after the first debates and is pulling away after the third. He’s ahead in Colorado and even in Wisconsin, states I’d previously conceded to Obama. Romney has pulled even in Ohio at 48% each.

In the three debates Romney came armed with facts. If anything, he’s a domestic and foreign policy wonk who likes details. Leadership comes naturally to him. Obama came armed with insults and attack points. Facts and details have never interested him and his priorities as president are suspect. Refusing to see Netanyahu due to a “busy schedule,” he left Washington for The View and an appearance on the Letterman show. Evidence is now leaking out that the White House was told within two hours that the Benghazi consulate was under attack. He did nothing even after an al-Qaeda group credit for it on Facebook. Instead he took off for a Nevada fundraiser. One has to wonder if the man wants to be president or is it Michelle who wants him to be president.

The enveloping Libyan scandal has shaved Obama’s substantial lead over Romney on foreign policy and with the help of the third debate, they are now even. Romney is well ahead in handling domestic policy. The undecided and Independent voters have seen nothing in the debates that would scare them about Romney’s fitness for the office. So while Obama may have won the second and third debates by small margins, the important thing is that Romney is winning the race by an increasing margin with two weeks to go.

As it turns out, Obama was wrong even on horses and bayonets. True, horses remain in military use primarily for ceremonial reasons – largely funerals. My uncle’s remains were drawn to his burial site in Arlington National Cemetery on a horse-drawn caisson. Bayonets are a different thing. There are now more than 600,000 in the military inventory, more than the number of soldiers on the eve of WW I and WW II – something Obama might have known if he spent more time understanding the military.

Voters would do well to heed the questions Reagan asked them on the eve of the 1980 election:

Next Tuesday all of you will go to the polls, will stand there in the polling place and make a decision. I think when you make that decision, it might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we're as strong as we were four years ago? And if you answer all of those questions yes, why then, I think your choice is very obvious as to whom you will vote for. If you don't agree, if you don't think that this course that we've been on for the last four years is what you would like to see us follow for the next four, then I could suggest another choice that you have. This country doesn't have to be in the shape that it is in.

An Atlanta caller to the Bill Bennett morning talk show this week said his drive route to his office takes him through “a neighborhood of million dollar homes.” In 2008 their front yards blossomed with Obama signs. This year there is only one Obama sign. All of the other signs say “For Sale.”