I am seriously confused. Who is Mitt Romney? How did he hypnotize me like this? Honestly, trying to frame himself like a "severely conservative Republican governor" of Massachusetts was how he won the primaries, and it was clear that wouldn't hold in the general election. But then he made Paul Ryan his running mate and we all had to ask: What is in it for him to keep playing to the conservative base? Of course, now the answer is clear. Mitt Romney plans on winning the election by running as a more moderate Barack Obama.
This first debate was on the economy, jobs, health care, financial reform and essentially every part of domestic policy that Mitt Romney can talk about without turning people off. I was almost convinced to stop supporting Obama. Then I remembered something important: Mitt Romney was able to put his best foot forward in this debate. President Obama, while not making mistakes in what he said, made the mistake of not calling Mitt Romney out on his mistakes, misrepresentations and lies. Which is interesting, because the advertisements approved by Barack Obama do a much better job at this.
His $5 trillion tax plan? In reality, there is no mathematical way to reduce taxes in the way he describes without adding to the deficit or eliminating loopholes that affect the middle and lower class. Take the child tax credit, for instance. Things that middle class families depend on. The studies that Romney cites are not nonpartisan, and two of them were released by Romney supporters. Also, there are five, not six. Also, Obama was right to point out that the Bush tax cuts did not create jobs (so the model that tax cuts create jobs touted by Republicans is simply not true), and the Clinton tax rates were during an extremely large expansion of job growth.
Romney also tried to pretend that there is a board in "Obamacare" that rations health care and tells "people ultimately what kind of treatments they can have." Obama correctly rebutted this by saying that that is legally impossible: it is written in the law that they cannot ration care or reduce Medicare benefits. However, they can recommend cost-saving measures. Sounds like a good idea, really, considering the financial cliff Medicare is headed for according to both parties.
Governor Romney also misrepresented the Obama administration's record on incomes and deficits. He stated that the incomes of middle-income Americans have gone down by $4,300, while the actual number is closer to $2,500. Still not something for the president to be proud of, but not as drastic as stated. Also, the deficit did not double during Obama's presidency. It stayed relatively stagnant, going up a bit and then going back down to its levels during the last year of the Bush presidency. He was, however, right that Obama promised to cut it in half.
The most important issue I had with Romney's statements was when he said that he worked with Democrats in Massachusetts. It's Massachusetts. He had no choice. Obama had a choice, and he still chose to work with Republicans. He handed Boehner a political slam-dunk of a deficit reduction package, and it was still refused because it included revenue. The other side refuses to work with Obama, not the other way around. That misrepresentation is the most heinous and dangerous of all, because it puts the blame in the wrong place.
My question is: if I can sit here and one by one knock down Romney's inaccuracies with such fervor, why couldn't the president, who has presumably been training for this debate? Why did he seem so tired and awkward? Was he just caught off guard by Romney's complete makeover into a confident man with great points (even if they were inaccurate)? This was President Obama's first chance to bring the facts to the game and challenge Romney's assertions, and he failed. Has he not learned that that's how he's going to win? That that's how Bill Clinton moved crowds in the Democratic National Convention? By showing the facts, by showing the ridiculousness of Mitt Romney's proposals, by showing that he will create jobs and how he will do it. By attacking Mitt Romney's lack of specifics. There are two debates left, and if the president wants to win this election, he would do well to learn the lessons of this debate and come back stronger in the next one.
Vijay Reddy is a College senior from Fayetteville, Ga.
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