One of these guys
looked presidential and one of them looked like a somewhat desperate challenger.
Romney looked like the president, and Obama looked like the challenger. In
preparing for this debate Romney may have demonstrated his presidential mettle
in a way that he has not demonstrated before now. He showed guts and the
willingness to go against mainstream thinking, even some in his own party. He
was also willing to place a substantial bet on his own intuition about the mood
of the American people. This is the stuff of presidents.
I believe that Romney
took a cold, hard look at the numbers and decided that on the current course, he
would win. The only thing that could side track him would be to make women and
independents feel that, even if he was strong on economic issues, he was not up
to the potentially-even-more-important challenges that foreign policy presents
to a president. It seems to me that Mitt’s thinking went something like
this:
“Some American voters
are fed up and disillusioned, but are still looking for a level of comfort
before they vote to replace Obama. I must not scare them off by playing into
Obama’s mantra that I’m eager to get the United States into another war. That’s
the last thing I want and I think I can persuade these folks of
that.
“But in order to seal
the deal, I’m going to have to absorb some hits. If Obama is looking at the same
numbers and trends that I am (and he is), then he will come out aggressive and
unpresidential. He feels he has no choice. He is under pressure, however he
doesn’t do well under pressure. As the media’s favorite son, Obama has seldom
been tested. It has taken a tough campaign and a challenger who would go toe to
toe with him to bring out Obama’s natural resentment of anyone who criticizes or
contradicts him. He much prefers to talk down to people, literally, such as
when, during a State of the Union address, he castigated the Supreme Court and
misled the American people about what the High Court had done, or when he
lectured and denigrated Paul Ryan to his face in a speech before Congressional
leaders after Ryan submitted a budget plan.
“People are not used to
seeing that look on Obama’s face when the shoe is on the other foot — when he is
desperate. I want them to see that look. Obama will be even more frustrated when
I don’t take the bait. When Obama takes a serious, debatable issue of foreign
policy and turns it into a personal shot at me, I win, he loses. If Obama is
vulnerable on anything more than his disastrous past record, it’s his total
failure to put forth a credible plan for the future. So when he attacks me,
instead of answering the attack, I’ll just pivot and say that an attack on me is
not a plan for the future, reminding everybody of his
weakness."
- Fred Thompson
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