Eugene Robinson: Obama outpoints Romney in third debate
The “horses and bayonets” moment is probably the headline. But the larger story of the third and final presidential debate, ostensibly about foreign policy, is that Mitt Romney didn’t really lay a glove on President Obama. For most of the evening, he didn’t even try.
Obama came ready to punch, Romney to counterpunch — or, since we’re torturing the boxing metaphor, to clinch. He agreed with Obama’s policy on Afghanistan, on Libya, on Syria, on the use of pilotless drones in the fight against al-Qaeda, pretty much on everything except how to improve the U.S. economy. Which wasn’t even supposed to be a topic of discussion, but apparently nobody told the candidates.
The president spent much of the evening recounting Romney’s earlier, contradictory foreign-policy positions — his prior view, for example, that the United States shouldn’t have pressed to oust Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi because that amounted to “mission creep.” On that issue, as on many others, Romney simply did not acknowledge his flip-flops. It was as if he were at a dinner party and someone brought up a topic too vulgar for polite company.
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Throughout, Obama was confident and sure-footed. Romney was much less so. It was Romney’s weakest performance of the three presidential debates — an instant poll by CBS found 53 percent of those surveyed believed Obama won, compared to 23 percent who gave the nod to Romney — and if anyone gets a post-debate boost in the polls, it is likely to be the president.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-obama-outpoints-romney-in-third-debate/2012/10/23/a1342358-1c77-11e2-9cd5-b55c38388962_story.html?hpid=z4
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