Some habits die hard. I watched yesterday’s debate between President Barack Obama of the US and his Republican opponent Mitt Romney, the first among the three planned, more out of a sense of necessity of a self-confessed news-junkie than out of the rush of excitement I had felt four years ago. It turns out that I was right in feeling so.
Four years ago, candidate Obama symbolised aspirations of the entire world. He appeared exactly what this troubled planet, buffeted by relentless terrorism, unwinnable wars and all-consuming greed, needed. His ringing oratory, carefully interspersed with chosen bits of autobiography and his evident erudition made it both possible and immensely satisfying to read our own as yet unfulfilled visions of future into his lofty rhetoric. He was then our collective Rorschach blob, becoming whatever we wanted him to be, which was mostly for the good. Thus was born the legend of Obama the transformative leader.
His popularity surged after the election. Some of us believed him to be in the same class of American presidents as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. We chose to treat the prematurity of his Nobel Peace prize as a harbinger of an era of global peace.
His domestic opponents never rested. The U S economy continued to sputter and the jobless rate stubbornly hovered between eight and nine per cent. It still does, despite the repeated stimuli provided by the administration. Obama’s claim that without his initiatives, the economic crisis he had inherited would have been far worse has a ring of truth, but offers no solace to those who lost their jobs and now have increasing difficulty finding one.
Thus, the key concern of the average American voter is employment. That is why Romney repeatedly stated in the debate yesterday that job creation is his topmost priority. The voter is alarmed when she hears a presidential candidate say that 23 million Americans are unemployed. The claim that the US auto industry has bounced back and that 5 million new jobs have been added is not strong enough to lift the pall of gloom.
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Obama has real achievements to his credit: bringing some order and fairness into the chaotic and exorbitantly expensive health care; attempting to streamline and control the runaway social security system, as well as a semblance of withdrawal of American troops from global trouble spots. But to those already laid off or dreading the pink slip, these are diversions of presidential attention.
Obama, the intelligent leader that he is, surely knows this and has felt frustrated by it quite often. He has been at his job now for close to four years, care-worn and weighed down by responsibilities. And it shows. His attitude in the debate struck me as the response of a capable person who knows that he has been less than a spectacular success at what he has been doing. “I am doing the best anyone can in this impossible situation. If you don’t like it, tough. Get someone who you think can do better,” goes this line of thinking. The audience knows the tone and more often than not, its response is, “We will.” I should know, because I have been there, and not just once, with the same disastrous consequences.
The American media will doubtless analyse every factoid, number or anecdote used by the debaters to see if there is falsification or exaggeration. Unless these are outrageously monumental, the findings of the fact-checkers and analysts would matter only to pedants. The voter is concerned not so much about the veracity or accuracy of the narrative, but about the manner in which it was delivered. The question would not be so much as to who was more truthful or accurate as to who carried greater conviction. Obama was not that person yesterday.
So Obama last morning was worse, a lot worse, than his poorest performance until now. On his own, Romney was better than before, but not quite a lot. The juxtaposition of the two positions opened up a wide gulf. In one corner, we had a weary and wary chief executive, who seemed to have lost his zest for the job, was shifty and at times hesitant in his responses, avoiding eye contact whenever the unforgiving electronic Cyclops closed in on him. n the other corner, we had a business-like opponent, who, though nowhere near inspiring, appeared confident and delivered his report to his stockholders with a degree of assurance and efficiency. In these troubled times, that perhaps counts for a lot. The viewers certainly thought so; the CNN poll gave the round to the Challenger by a thumping margin of 67 per cent to 25 per cent.
Will candidate Obama of 2008 now resurface? Perhaps it is still early days. Perhaps like Senator Kerry in 2004, Romney will blow the boost he gets from winning the first debate. Perhaps it would be like the Indian cricket team, which despite invariably losing early practice games on a tour, sometimes goes on to win the series. Those instances have now become exceedingly rare!