Mitt Romney overwhelmingly won the first presidential debate. His poll numbers began surging. (More on that in a moment.) The second debate went to President Obama but just barely. The third debate was important for both men but crucial for Obama.
I’m a big Carolina basketball fan from way back; old enough to remember Coach Dean Smith’s four corners offense. That’s when the Heels would take the lead in a tight game toward the end and basically just hold the ball until the clock ran out. Opponents hated it. That’s why they instituted the shot clock in college basketball.
The idea was to keep the other team from getting control of the ball and scoring. Of course, that meant you wouldn’t score anymore points either. That was the strategy I suggested for Mitt Romney in the final debate and it looks like he may have taken my advice.
Many (me included) were a bit disappointed that he didn’t go after Obama harder on the Libya issue. There were so many points he could’ve scored. I would’ve started something like this. “Mr. President, you and Candy Crowley in the last debate maintained that you referred to the Benghazi attack the day after as an ‘act of terror.’ If you knew it the day after, why did you insist for three weeks that the attack was the product of a spontaneous protest that got out of hand over a YouTube video when you knew you were telling a lie?”
That confrontation never happened. Perhaps Romney was smart in making sure it didn’t. One thing Romney learned from the second debate is that he, at times, came across as rude. The beauty of the first debate was that he was so darn likeable; more so than most people had imagined. He also came across as more presidential.
In the final debate, the old Romney demeanor was back and Obama looked like a desperate candidate playing catch-up. Sure, he had a couple of nice zingers but they came at the cost of looking presidential.
The polls have been showing Romney surging since the first debate. It’s my belief that he’s been surging for much longer than that. The reason his surge was not showing in the polls is because the polls were oversampling Democrats. A prime example is the Pew Research Center poll which was oversampling Democrats before the first debate by 10 points. After the debate it began oversampling Republicans by 5 points. That produced a 12-point swing, taking Obama from 8 points ahead to 4 points behind.
Barring some October surprise, I see Romney winning by 7 to 8 points in the popular vote with about 285 electoral votes, 15 over the 270 needed to win. Of course, anything can happen. Gloria Allred, it’s rumored, is standing in the wings with a woman who says Romney “bullied” her when he was her bishop 30 years ago. Seems she came to him because she was pregnant and he urged her to keep her baby. Man, he sure sounds like some bully, doesn’t he? Now if you advise a woman not to have an abortion you’re somehow evil. Is that all you’ve got, Gloria?
But another surprise could be Iran. Note the president’s language during the final debate. He said “the clock is ticking” on Iran. What exactly does that mean? Will the alarm go off on, say, Nov. 1? None of us wants Iran to get the nuclear bomb, but I’m not sure the American people are ready for another war in the Middle East. The surprise just might be on Mr. Obama.
