WHAT MATTERED less in this last TV debate was the substance of policy differences – in truth there were few – but convincing voters that, with the same policies, Mitt Romney would be at least as credible as a commander in chief as President Obama. And although the latter clearly won the Boca Raton foreign policy debate – a CBS News instant poll found 53 per cent believed Obama won it, with 23 per cent for Romney – Romney’s performance on what is for him a weak issue was probably enough to sustain the poll surge that has the two men now neck and neck.
Even on the issue of who voters believe would better manage the country’s international affairs Obama’s eight-point advantage in September has slipped to five, according to a pre-debate Washington Post-ABC News tracking poll. That Romney has abandoned some of the more bellicose language and posturing from the days of the primaries will have been reassuring to an international audience, but his shift to the middle ground exposed him repeatedly to telling accusations from the president of inconsistency.
So the challenger now insists he does not want to bomb Iran immediately, ruled out a US military role in Syria’s civil war, endorsed a 2014 pull-out from Afghanistan, urged continuing relations with that poor ally Pakistan . . . He used Obama’s own words to characterise his willingness to defend Israel if attacked, even praised the president for overseeing the killing of Osama bin Laden, and avoided blaming him over the killing of the US ambassador in Libya.
But there was a distinctly rehearsed quality to much of Romney’s responses, a sense that this was a student regurgitating the content of briefing notes, homework imperfectly understood. Of Pakistan, he said: “It’s a nation that’s not like . . . like others and it does not have a civilian leadership that is calling the shots there. You have the ISI, their intelligence organisation, is probably the most powerful of the . . . of three branches there. Then you have the military and then you have the civilian government. . .” Trying to appeal to the common man as a champion of the car industry, he committed a classic Romneyism – “I’m a son of Detroit. I was born in Detroit. My dad was head of a car company.”
And schoolmaster Obama effectively swatted aside his rival’s complaint that the US now has fewer ships in its navy than in 1916: “Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military’s changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them . . .” Romney’s central and clearly effective critique, however, was that Obama had been weak in the face of “a rising tide of chaos” in the world, a perception that had encouraged tyrants such as Ahmadinejad to defy him, weakening US standing in the world. That others around the world, polls suggest, see Obama’s US in a better, kinder light than his predecessor’s simply doesn’t matter to Boca Raton– with two weeks to go.