The Weekly Standard

COLD OPEN As a recovering science major, I've long been obsessed with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the basic gist of which is this: Observing a thing changes it. What’s true of particle physics is true of political theater. I watched the first Obama- Romney debate with Twitter's constant stream of commentary playing in front of me in real time. Having the echo chamber in your head while the real event unfolds is a strange experience, and it was hard to come to any organic conclusions of my own. For the Biden-Ryan debate, I watched it—quiz show style—in an isolation chamber. Due to forces beyond my control, I wasn't able to watch Tuesday's town hall debate live. So instead, I took it in backwards: I watched it after reading all of the next-day stories, to see how that colored the experience. So here are my (scientific!) takeaways from Obama-Romney II: Reading the news accounts, I expected Obama and Romney to go at it in some kind of pro wrestling gimmick fight—a steel cage match or a Texas Death match. Everyone said it was brutal, and I was prepared for blood. But it really never got out of hand. Contentious? Yes. Clearly, both men are fully engaged and want to win. It was sternly clarifying. That’s not a bad thing. George Will said that this was the best debate he's seen since 1960. I don't know that I'd go that far. But it wasn't ugly. It was just a night of hardball. The consensus was that Obama won the night on points. I'd agree. But Romney was still strong in many spots. His answer on domestic oil production and energy was sterling: clear; example-laden; just enough backward-looking blame for Obama's terrible record, but with a clean pivot to his own forward-looking agenda. You can understand why the insta-polls showed Romney winning the economic arguments by a fair margin. Also, not many people talked about Romney's closing statement, but it was powerful and moving. That said, Romney also showed a couple of flashes of the guy who occasionally misfired in the primary debates. As masterful as he was in pushing Jim Lehrer around in the first debate and asserting his will, when he tried to steamroll Candy Crowley and simultaneously appeal to the debate rules, it was awkward. When he insisted that Obama answer his questions, he wandered in the direction of "I'll bet you $10,000" territory. Thankfully, he never quite crossed that line. But he got close enough to make you nervous . Several months ago, Team Obama made a strategic decision to attack Romney not as a flip-flopper but as an arch conservative out of step with the American mainstream. (If only that were true!) It struck me that Tuesday night Axelrod & Co. showed some signs of regretting this decision. Frequently President Obama went after Romney for untruths (on taxes) and flip-flops (on his history of opposing coal power). Those attacks would have had a lot more force if Obama had spent the last 28 weeks preparing the ground for Romney being the second coming of John Kerry. The Obama operation also seems to fixate on the stupidest things. After the first debate, they tried to make a big deal over Big Bird. After this debate, they went crazy over Romney’s "binders of women." For such a sophisticated operation, this is bush league stuff. The conventional wisdom has long been that debates don't really matter. Sixty-seven million people watched the first debate, and when you look at the Real Clear Politics average of polls, that debate became an inflection point, catapulting Romney to his first lead of the entire race. This debate had an audience roughly the same size. It’ll be interesting to see what effect it has—if any—on the numbers. My instinct tells me that it’ll be muted: a slight Obama rebound as Romney regresses a little to his mean. But we may be heading to a coin-flip election.   LOOKING BACK "Two of the country's best-known journalists embark on a two-and-a-half-year economics investigation that results in an article so long it has to be divided into ten parts. Their cash-strapped newspaper pours half a million dollars into an advertising campaign, and a leading publisher plans a book version with an initial printing that could reach 125,000. Dozens of papers beg—and bid—for syndication rights. And when it finally appears, it becomes an object of such derision in the mainstream press that just about the only person with anything nice to say about it is vagabond vice-presidential candidate Pat Choate." —Christopher Caldwell, "Pulitzer Bait in Philly," from our October 14, 1996, issue. Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe.