Obama and the Democrats had a great convention, and the Republicans and Mitt Romney had a bad convention, with Clint Eastwood merely the most memorably bad part. Then Mitt Romney had a great first debate and Obama had a bad first debate, which was all the more bad because of how much it changed the narrative of the campaign (the media loves a new narrative!). So now we are back where we started, with the fundamentals making Obama a slight favorite, but with the election really anyone's game. As an ardent Obama supporter this should have me worried, but somehow it doesn't at the moment. For one thing I am confident that the president will turn in a much better debate performance in the second presidential debate. He didn't lose the first debate on arguments, he lost it on tone, body language and posture, which should not be discounted, we say a lot with how we carry ourselves, and no one wants to follow a president who is not confident and self-assured, especially when he's defending his record and his plans for the future of our country. But the president has good arguments, he simply has to marshal them. Here are some things I'd like to see the president do.
1) Directly appeal to young families and young female voters in particular by campaigning for mandating employer provided maternity and paternity leave. Maternity leave should be a no brainer for the president. It helps him highlight the Republican party's ambivalence to female voters, and the democratic party's historical strength with that demographic. Also, this gives his younger supporters something to be excited about.
2) The payroll tax holiday is about to expire at the end of this year, and most economists expect the end of the holiday to exert a significant drag on the economy at just the wrong time. Why not commit to trying to extend it if you're president and make Mitt Romney say why he wouldn't support such a move. It's good policy and it's a strong direct appeal to the middle class, and as long as politicians are getting away with saying things they'll never do, why not at least try to reignite some momentum behind an actually worthwhile idea, even if Congress will never go along with it.
3) Talk more bluntly about why his record and his plans for the future of the country are better than Mitt Romney's. Romney gave a rather generic republican foreign policy speech this week in an attempt to convince voters that he can pass the commander in chief test, but Obama has a lot of actual foreign policy accomplishments to point to. 1) Bin Laden, 2) a number of free trade agreements (despite Romney's contentions), 3) the sure handed Opening up of Burma, 4) Libya (the tragic death of our Ambassador and several embassy staff not withstanding), 5) the broad tough sanctions against Iran, which would never have been achieved if the president did not make it clear through his open overtures to Iran that the Iranian regime was not interested in diplomacy or compromise in ending its pursuit of nuclear weapons, 6) the elegantly executed safe-harboring of Chen Guangcheng, and the list could go on. If he wants to talk about the economy, he can talk about the 2+ years of private sector job growth and the fact that the unemployment rate is now below where it was when he came into office. If he wants to talk about healthcare he can talk about the 80 million plus people who would lose their health insurance under Romney's plan because they have preexisting conditions, or the fact that the federal government picked up a large part of the tab for Romneycare, and in the words of Jeb Bartlett, can we have our money back? Also, and perhaps more importantly, it is obvious to anyone with a calculator that Romney does not currently have a workable plan to bring down the deficit. Obama should call him on this, and do so succinctly and clearly. He should say something like
"To reduce the deficit Governor Romney wants to start by reducing tax revenue by 5 trillion dollars, then he wants to increase military spending by 2 trilling dollars. Then he wants to start reducing the deficit. Now, you know, if I told my wife that my solution to our household budget problems was to switch to working half time and buy that new sports car I've had my eye on, she'd slap me upside the head and tell me grow up. And she'd be right, because you know when you reduce the amount of money you have coming in, and you spend more on things you don't need like a $2 trillion increase the pentagon isn't asking for, well then you have to cut back on the basics, the things people are counting on like medicare, and medicaid, and funding for education and medical research, and for our crumbling roads and bridges, and pretty soon you're living in a country where it's everyone for themselves, and not a country where we care for and support each other."
The president is fully capable of making these arguments. All he needs is 1) a good nights sleep before the next debate, 2) to remember that American's like presidents who want to fight for them.
I wish him all the best. We still need him to finish the job he started.
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