We now head into the home stretch of the election campaign. The last of three debates will be Monday and election day follows fifteen days later. The election promises to be close, and could go either way. At this late juncture, what can the Obama campaign do to regain its earlier edge, or at least enough of an edge to win?
The first debate legitimized the Romney candidacy. His campaign was flagging and slowly falling farther behind. The Obama strategy had been to make him unacceptable, and the strategy was working. But then a weak debate performance by the President derailed that strategy. Romney became an acceptable alternative to many people who hadn't thought so before.
The second debate seems to have arrested Romney's momentum. Obama was prepared, back on his game, and in command. Analyst Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight site has an unblemished track record at this sort of thing, currently pegs Obama with an electoral lead of 289 to 249 and a 68% probability of winning the election. Yet that margin is razor-thin. A turnaround in closely-contested Ohio and any other single state Obama leads in and Romney would win.
Monday's debate will be on foreign policy. In order to do well, Obama will need to offer a cogent explanation and defense of the Administration's handling of events in Libya, Syria and Iran, where Romney will surely be on the attack. China policy will come up too, and will offer an opportunity for both candidates to give their pitches on the economy, which is what the American people most want to hear about. And it is here, I believe, that Obama must change his strategy to make headway toward securing victory in this election.
It is valid to point out that Romney's economic plans are "sketchy" and "don't add up," as the President frequently says. They are a combination of talking points and vagaries, justified by laughable inconsistencies in basic arithmetic. But the likelihood that one candidate is trying to sell snake oil in and of itself may not beat him if the other candidate has nothing to replace it with. Obama's pitch is mostly that Romney's plan is no good. As for himself, Obama points to the mess he inherited, then talks about the Detroit bailout, green jobs, and that indicators such as unemployment, and that home starts, prices and foreclosures have been trending better of late. What he lacks is a memorable vision of what he will do if elected to a second term. Romney can recite his Five Point Plan. It may mostly be smoke and mirrors but at least it is a plan. In my view, the President needs one of his own if he is to make his re-election more than a fifty-fifty proposition. Just today Paul Ryan said of Obama, "He's not even telling you what he plans on doing."
A winning plan ought to touch on manufacturing, preserving Social Security and Medicare, energy, infrastructure, education and comprehensive fiscal reform, i.e. something like Simpson-Bowles to attack the deficit problem. Obama does have ideas and initiatives on all of these, but really needs to encapsulate them in an easy-to-remember six point plan. You can't fight something with nothing, and without his own economic plan firmly fixed in the voters' minds a lot of people will opt for the guy with a sketchy plan over the guy seemingly without one. The third debate will provide an audience of at least 50 million people, the largest viewership left for either campaign to make its last best appeal. We'll see if the President and his team are on top of this one. They need to be, and it's getting very late in the game.
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