James Fallows

There's a connection between two themes I've been hitting hard recently: the surprising extension of "stop and frisk" inspections into the general-aviation world, and Barack Obama's announcement that the time had come formally to end the "war on terror."

The connection is that events in the first category -- overreach of the security state, at home and abroad -- are reflections of the second development: the 11-plus years of "permanent emergency" in America's rhetoric and laws about terrorist threats. In this war like many previous ones, "normal" Constitutional constraints and checks-and-balances were suspended. But all previous wars ended. Until this week, no president or serious presidential contender had argued that, for the health of America's democracy, it was time to end this one too. 

In his speech this week, Obama quoted James Madison to the same effect: "No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." Seven years ago, in the issue shown below, I tried to imagine what a future speech like Obama's would sound like. This was its [imagined] peroration:

"My fellow Americans, we have achieved something almost no one thought possible five years ago. The nation did not suffer the quick follow-up attacks so many people feared and expected. Our troops found the people who were responsible for the worst attack ever on our soil. We killed many, we captured more, and we placed their leaders in a position where they could not direct the next despicable attack on our people--and where the conscience of the world's people, of whatever faith, has turned against them for their barbarism. They have been a shame to their own great faith, and to all other historic standards of decency.

"Achieving this victory does not mean the end of threats. Life is never free of dangers. I wish I could tell you that no American will ever again be killed or wounded by a terrorist--and that no other person on this earth will be either. But I cannot say that, and you could not believe me if I did. Life brings risk--especially life in an open society, like the one that people of this land have sacrificed for centuries to create.

"We have achieved a great victory, and for that we can give thanks--above all to our troops. We will be at our best if we do not let fear paralyze or obsess us. We will be at our best if we instead optimistically and enthusiastically begin the next chapter in our nation's growth. We will deal with the struggles of our time. These include coping with terrorism, but also recognizing the huge shifts in power and resulting possibilities in Asia, in Latin America, in many other parts of the world. We will recognize the challenges of including the people left behind in the process of global development--people in the Middle East, in Africa, even in developed countries like our own. The world's scientists have never before had so much to offer, so fast--and humanity has never needed their discoveries more than we do now, to preserve the world's environment, to develop new sources of energy, to improve the quality of people's lives in every corner of the globe, to contain the threats that modern weaponry can put into the hands of individuals or small groups.

"The great organizing challenge of our time includes coping with the threat of bombings and with the political extremism that lies behind it. That is one part of this era's duty. But it is not the entirety. History will judge us on our ability to deal with the full range of this era's challenges--and opportunities. With quiet pride, we recognize the victory we have won. And with the determination that has marked us through our nation's history, we continue the pursuit of our American mission, undeterred by the perils that we will face." [End of imagined speech. Note: no 'God Bless America' ending.]

Different leaders will choose different words. But the message--of realism, of courage, and of optimism despite life's difficulties--is one we need to hear.

The different leader of 2013 did indeed choose different words. But the essence of his message was one I have been waiting for a long time to hear.
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In-house note: That September 2006 issue, with its cover story rashly announcing "We Win," was the first one fully under James Bennet's control after he arrived as editor. By the time he got here I had already begun work on this "declare victory" article.

It was a very gutsy choice for him to stick with that story, and that claim, as the cover of one of his early issues. What if some big bomb went off somewhere just before or after the issue appeared? By the strict logic of the story, that "shouldn't" matter. In the story I took great pains to explain, quoting many historians and experts in the long arc of terrorism, that attacks probably would continue, as other disasters and misfortunes do. Nonetheless (I said) we shouldn't let that blind us to the damage done by an open-ended state of war. That's fine as far as logic goes -- but in the real, trans-logical world of emotion and buzz, we unavoidably would have looked bad, "Dewey Beats Truman"-style. The risk was all the greater with a new editor's first issue, and even more so when the writer (me) had moved to China as soon as the article was done but before it had appeared. I have always been grateful for the guts of James Bennet's choice to go ahead. 

Let's have fun with metonymy! I got into this thicket with an early scene in my new profile of Jerry Brown. Here I was trying to convey the interesting/odd experience of talking with the man:

"Do you know what 'metonym' means?" [Brown] asked out of the blue one time. Unfortunately, I didn't. (To spare you my embarrassment: it's a name used as a reference for something else, like "K Street" for Washington's lobbying culture, or "Silicon Valley" for the tech industry.) The surprise, coming from a politician, was that he was actually asking for information rather than testing me or pretending he already knew. "Me neither," he said after my admission, "but I know it's very big with the deconstructionists." I did better when he asked whether I knew where the phrase "no country for old men" had come from. Yes! It's the first line of Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium," which became the title of a novel by Cormac McCarthy, which was in turn the basis for a 2007 movie by the Coen brothers. Brown said that he was wondering because he'd just talked with a Washington media grandee* who used the phrase without knowing that it had any history. "Jerry didn't know there was a movie," his wife [Anne Gust Brown] said.

I half-heard the president's commencement address at Morehouse when coming back to D.C. this weekend. I saw a clip of it again late last night and thought: this is another sample and reminder of Barack Obama's reserves of rhetorical strength. Like his other big, punctuating speeches (as I have discussed previously here, here, here, and elsewhere), this one appealed to both the mind and the heart; it built an argument over a span of paragraphs rather than in isolated phrases; and it grew from Obama's position as a man part of, but also apart from, America's normal racial classifications.

Before I had a chance to write anything about the speech, I read two other reactions. One was from my former colleague Andrew Sullivan, who was defending the speech against idiotic accusations that it was "race-baiting" and too black. The other was from my current Atlantic colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates, who criticized the speech for being too hectoring of Obama's Morehouse audience in a way he wouldn't have been at Dartmouth or Stanford:

Barack Obama is, indeed, the president of "all America," but he also is singularly the scold of "black America."

As I told Ta-Nehisi by phone this evening, I naturally cut Obama more slack on this point than he does. (And of course I hear the speech differently too.) We all take a different tone in setting expectations for "our own." I can hold Americans overseas to a different standard than I would Russians or Japanese; I can harangue (and have!) my colleagues in the press about why we should do better; I expect something from myself and my kids I wouldn't expect from you and your kids, and so on. The challenge for Obama, exactly as Ta-Nehisi pointed out, is that he is simultaneously addressing all Americans as his own (apart from those who consider him alien) while also in this speech addressing as his own the most historically distinct subset of our population.

So, I was glad to see Andrew Sullivan's defense; and I understood the logic of Ta-Nehisi Coates's frustrated criticism. Which led me to the main conclusion: about the near-impossibility of the tightrope act Barack Obama is attempting as America's first non-white president, and the unusual combination of virtuosity (as with this speech) and unflappability (as with criticism of the speech) with which he has mainly carried it off.

I increasingly think of Obama as walking a tiny, little rope suspended across a Grand Canyon. Through four and a half years he has mainly kept his footing, in a way that becomes cumulatively surprising -- and I say that even while disagreeing with many of his policies, notably including the recent security-state extensions.  Every now and then, as with this speech, we see how hard what he is doing is.

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on Dreams From My Father, was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer. Not as a pro basketball player, which might have been his original fantasy (or pro golfer, despite recent tips from Tiger Woods); or as a game-show host or famous disc jockey, where you can imagine Bill Clinton being a big success; or as commissioner of baseball, the path-not-taken for G.W. Bush; or as a backstage legislative master, like Lyndon Johnson or even Teddy Kennedy. But in nonfiction writing, he coulda been a contender.

He might also be vying for the ever-dwindling number of editor jobs that are available. Three years ago I posted the picture of his hand-edited version of his address to a Joint Session of Congress on health-care reform. Now we get this White House photo of his reworking of last month' inaugural address. Click for a zoomable detailed view.



There are lots of fascinating details and insights from the edits Obama has made here, and from comparison with the final version he delivered six days after this draft. I'll leave most of them for you to find and will mention only one.

As I noted at the time, early in the speech Obama made a very powerful allusion to Lincoln's second inaugural address:

Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free.

That line isn't in this draft shown in the picture --  at least not the part we can see. But Obama is working toward it with this handwritten insert at the top of the page:

 Through blood and toil ____ we learned that no nation founded on these principles could survive half-slave and half-free.

He recognizes that "toil" is not right -- "blood and toil" would be an allusion to Churchill, not Lincoln -- but he also knows that for cadence he needs another word after "blood," where he's crossed out "toil" and left a  ___  mark.

At some point between this draft and delivery time he or his assistants figured out that the most elegant approach would be simply to use Lincoln's phrase -- and, part of the elegance, just to use it as an allusion, an element of the national heritage Americans either should know or could know, rather than lumbering it with a heavy "in the words of our Sixteenth President" attribution. Much as our Sixteenth President himself had once used the phrase "a house divided" without having to tell his audience that he was quoting the Bible. There's much to observe in this one image. Thanks to reader KP.

As others may have pointed out, in the movie Man of the Year, Robin Williams character Tom Dobbs speaks this line:

But the last few years we've been divided. Red states, blue states.
There are no red and blue states, there's only the United States of America. That's what we're about.

Several days ago, in my annotation* of this year's State of the Union address, I mentioned that I'd remembered Barack Obama having said the following in his debut speech [right] at the 2004 Democratic convention: "Not 'red states' or 'blue states,' but the United States of America." In fact, as I found out when I went back to the transcript, he'd said something subtly but significantly different.

A reader in a position to know explains one reason for this aural-memory version of phantom-limb pain. The line I thought I remembered is closer to what Obama had intended to say -- until he was instructed not to, by John Kerry's team at the convention, since Kerry preferred to make that point himself. The person who wrote to me added some off-the-record confirming details, but he pointed me to this on-the-record account in an intriguing story called "The Speech," by David Bernstein in Chicago magazine, back in 2007. The relevant passage:

During one practice session, a Kerry speechwriter interrupted to say that Obama would need to rephrase or cut one of the lines from his speech because it was too similar to a line in Kerry's acceptance remarks. The line in question was the climax to Obama's famous passage on the red-states, blue-states divide. That passage, as Obama delivered it, reads: "The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states-red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states." Axelrod says Obama had originally written the passage to end with something like, "We're not red states and blue states; we're all Americans, standing up together for the red, white, and blue." But to satisfy Kerry's speechwriters, Axelrod says, Obama grudgingly cut out the line. A transcript of Kerry's competing text reads: "Maybe some just see us divided into those red states and blue states, but I see us as one America: red, white, and blue."

After the rehearsal ended, Obama was furious. "That fucker is trying to steal a line from my speech," he griped to Axelrod in the car on the way back to their hotel, according to another campaign aide who was there but asked to remain anonymous. Axelrod says he does not recollect exactly what Obama said to him. "He was unhappy about it, yeah," he says, but adds that Obama soon cooled down. "Ultimately, his feeling was: They had given him this great opportunity; who was he to quibble over one line?"  

The Bernstein story is full of nuggets like this that are all the more fascinating in retrospect. Here is one that really caught my eye, since I had remarked on Obama's use of exactly this "surfing" technique at the end of this latest SOTU (see note "ci-87").

Next, Obama had to master a technique known in professional public-speaking circles as "surfing" or "riding" the applause. [Speech consultant Michael] Sheehan explains how it works: "Because people at home don't hear when there's a big burst of applause-you hear it minimally in the background-speakers have to talk over the applause; otherwise there's long gaps of silence. People are clapping but you can't hear it at home-it's like, sentence-pause-sentence-pause-sentence-pause. It's just deadly."

While I'm at it, Andrew Sprung writes in with a parsing of the speech that makes sense to me. He starts with my remark that Obama is famously "eloquent" but not in a way that can be reduced to quotes or phrases (emphasis added):

1) Re that strange absence of memorable phrases: it's not just balanced by one strength, it's book-ended between two: conceptual complexity/coherence on the macro side, and cadence on the sub-micro. At least in 2007/2008, less so now, Obama's speeches were musical, hinging on repeat phrases (yes we can) and on the simplest of rhetorical devices, various forms of parallel structure, e.g. anaphora, the repetition of beginning words (also a lot of parallel phrasings in series -- "A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin" etc.).  It was no accident that Will.i.am was able to set one of his speeches to music to some effect.
 
2) What are some of those endlessly repeated ideas that stitch his speeches together? A top of the head list:
 
a) Prosperity is only sustainable if it's shared
b) Democratic government is a commitment to shared prosperity
c) At intervals, the American people demand and get new commitments to extend opportunity to excluded groups and to expand investment in shared prosperity
d) That historical process described in c) expresses a drive to fulfill the promises embedded in the country's documents -- and those documents triggered that drive both by articulating "self evident" truths of universal appeal and by creating a government machinery to channel the popular will. The drive to fulfill those promises is the never-ending quest for a 'more perfect union.'
e) Over time, the will of the people, expressed through democratic processes, will bend toward justice, toward provision of the rights laid out in the Declaration. That is the source of the e pluribus unum that Obama made his bones by affirming in 2004.
f) The principles articulated in the Declaration are the political expression of universal values professed by all major religions: I am my brother's keeper, sister's keeper, etc.  Political, in that by extending those values to "all men," they challenge the polity to expand the circle of those encompassed by the moral laws of the community -- basically, to extend them to everyone  -- without the carapace of a body of specific observances or doctrinal beliefs that divide the faithful from the infidels.
 
 It's a highly idealized view of American history, with a Hegelian/Fukuyaman undercurrent: the will of the people, channeled and unleashed by democracy, will tend toward ever increasing prosperity and progress and freedom. Idealized but basically right, I think -- if the period of growing inequality and government dysfunction we're in turns out to be cyclical and temporary rather than a marker of decline.

I agree entirely about the musical, and also preacherly, quality of Obama's speeches at their most "rhetorical." That's how "they deserve a vote" worked in this latest speech. Nothing memorable about those words, but he used them as if in a song or poem.

I think the "misremembering" of the red&blue states quote, comes exactly from obama reusing and refining the the same ideas.

he actually used the quote you remembered in a later speech. his 2008 victory-speech:

"Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and always will be, the United States of America."

Ted Cruz, the new senator from Texas, is worth keeping an eye on.Ted Cruz can't help it that his voice, his intonation, his posture at the microphone, and his overall style of speaking are so strongly reminiscent of Joe McCarthy's, who died long before Cruz was born. 

Last night I watched, discussed, and took real-time notes on the State of the Union address at The Atlantic's viewing fest in New York. As soon as I can finish working through the approx 7000 words in the speech transcript, ideally on the train back to Washington starting soon [and the rest of the day], and as soon as our web team can get the whole thing formatted so as to display annotations, glosses, and general play-by-play with each relevant passage, I'll post the Official Annotated State of the Union, 2013 Edition, in this space. For samples of what I mean about the annotation and the formatting, you can check out last year's version, or the one before that, or the one before that (just after Scott Brown's election ended the several-month stretch in which the Democrats held a 60-vote filibuster-breaking majority in the Senate), or this one from back in G.W. Bush's second term.

Last night's speech was very long, as you may have noticed, and like Obama's second inaugural address contained some surprises of policy -- plus rhetorical surprises of both the good and bad variety. For more, watch this space, I hope some time later today probably tomorrow.

On reading it through after hearing it, this is another carefully crafted speech. More so, I would say, than Obama's first inaugural address. But these two parts got my attention the instant I heard them:

1) Lash and sword. This inaugural address, like nearly all previous ones, began with an emphasis on the importance of democratic transfer-of-power. For instance, the first words of JFK's address in 1961 were, "We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom." But Obama introduced the familiar theme with this twist:

Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of [our founding] words with the realities of our time.  [Note: this preceding sentence is the one-sentence summary of the speech as a whole.] For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they've never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob.  They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed. 
 
And for more than two hundred years, we have. 
 
Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free.  We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.

I like the precise logical concision of contrasting "self-evident" with "self-executing" truths. But "blood drawn by the lash" is an impressive and confident touch. It was of course an allusion to a closing passage in what is generally considered history's only great second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln's in 1865 (right):

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Half-slave, half-free was an allusion to another of Lincoln's most famous addresses, his "House Divided" speech from his campaign for the Senate in 1858. (And Lincoln's phrase "house divided" was his own allusion to the Book of Mark.) 
 
2) Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall. I thought the allusion in this passage was eloquent on many levels:

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths -- that all of us are created equal -- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

The rhetorical and argumentative purpose of the speech as a whole was to connect what Obama considers the right next steps for America -- doing more things "together," making sure that everyone has an equal chance, tying each generation's interests to its predecessors' and its successors' -- with the precepts and ideals of the founders, rather than having them be seen as excesses of the modern welfare state. 

This was the most sustainedly "progressive" statement Barack Obama has made in his decade on the national stage.

I was expecting an anodyne tone-poem about healing national wounds, surmounting partisanship, and so on. As has often been the case, Obama confounded expectations -- mine, at least. Four years ago, when people were expecting a barn-burner, the newly inaugurated president Obama gave a deliberately downbeat, sober-toned presentation about the long challenges ahead. Now -- well, it's almost as if he has won re-election and knows he will never have to run again and hears the clock ticking on his last chance to use the power of the presidency on the causes he cares about. If anyone were wondering whether Obama wanted to lower expectations for his second term ... no, he apparently does not.

I mentioned earlier this week that Senator Daniel Inouye, who died at age 88, was as fine an exemplar of public virtues -- courage, dignity, public-spiritedness -- as modern America has offered. 

In the final two days of the campaign, the Romney-Ryan ticket and its supporters are all over President Obama for talking about "revenge." On Friday, when trying to shush supporters who were booing the mention of Mitt Romney's name, Obama said they shouldn't boo -- they should vote. Because, as he said in an ad-libbed line, "voting is the best revenge."

In the eyes of the right, that line is the offense -- and apparently they're not kidding. Fox News was immediately on it as the latest election-changing gaffe and outrage. And here's a sample from a Romney stump speech yesterday that then was included in an ad:

Yesterday, the president .. told his supporters, voting for revenge. Vote for revenge? Let me tell you what I'd like to tell you: Vote for love of country!"

The Fox Nation headline was "Obama: Vote for 'Revenge,' Romney: Vote for Love of Country.' "



No doubt the Romney campaign felt that it had caught Obama in an on-the-record version of the "clinging to guns and religion" line four years ago. Finally we get a real look at the guy, and what we see is someone who, like his mentor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, (a) doesn't love his country, and (b) is showing traits of that unsettling "angry black man-ism" that he usually manages to conceal so shrewdly behind his cool manner and big smile.

Of course, what we're actually seeing is the entirely different option (c): That Obama is so familiar with bookclub-level literary allusions (in this case the aphorism "living well is the best revenge"), rather than anything super highbrow, that he (c1) recognizes them as cliches or formulas that can be adapted, and (c2) assumes that at least some other people will also recognize them as such.

Illustration of point (c1) concerning language so familiar it can be adapted: In the first season of Homeland, the Brody family is taking a drive from the D.C. area to Gettysburg. They've just been discussing "Four-score and seven years ago..." One of the kids asks how far they still have to drive. The mother says, "Three-score miles." In the circumstances of that car, this also illustrates (c2).
 
When it comes to Obama's off-hand remark, I have exactly zero doubt that he thought he was applying a widely familiar term. That is what anyone of his age, background, and education would have had in mind. Let me put it this way: Last night, in an NPR interview with Guy Raz, Taylor Swift, who is all of 22, was discussing poems by Pablo Neruda. Is it so surprising that a sitting president, who is nearly three decades older than Swift and, unlike her, a college and law-school grad and author of a memoir packed with literary allusions, would have heard the very familiar saying "living well is the best revenge"? And would know that it doesn't mean anything like what Romney claimed. [Update: a number of people have written in saying, "Ok, what does it mean?" That's why I have the links below to Calvin Tomkins's article and other references. Look it up! Or listen to R.E.M. Short answer: it is about the opposite of "revenge" in the normal sense.] [And another update: This post's title is obviously exaggerated for effect, and I am not saying that anyone unfamiliar with "living well..." is an ignoramus. I am saying that the Romney campaign certainly knows what Obama was saying, and why -- and the ad suggesting otherwise is pandering to know-nothingism.]

Bonus question: is it possible that Mitt Romney himself -- who went to Stanford and then BYU, who lived in France, who went to Harvard Business School and like Obama to Harvard Law, who has lived for decades in Boston and considers himself well-read and has some literarily accomplished advisors -- has never heard of this saying? Is it conceivable that he actually believes Obama was talking about revenge-voting as if it were basically like "revenge sex"?

Just to show that familiarity with the phrase is not confined to people interested in F. Scott Fitzgerald; or Gerald and Sara Murphy, the arty American exiles in France who were supposedly the model for Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night and were the subjects of Calvin Tompkins's very popular book Living Well Is the Best Revenge and New Yorker article; nor even George Herbert, the English poet who 400-plus years ago coined the term "living well is the best revenge," I give you R.E.M.:

Following an earlier reader assessment of the subtle ways in which Barack Obama may have been trying to rile Mitt Romney -- apart from the quite obvious jibes and challenges he applied in the second debate -- another reader adds this observation:

Obama also did one other thing - constantly interjected comments like "that's not true" - or "you're wrong Governor" while Romney was speaking.  My experience in corporate life showed me very few CEOs or execs that would tolerate those types of disrespectful interjections while they are talking.   Romney becomes exasperated quite easily - and then he goes to adrenaline pumping "attacky" Romney --- "I'll give you some advice."  --- or following up on the text of the Rose Garden speech - even when Obama said "proceed Governor" - a sure sign that this was a trap.   

Two things happen when the Governor's adrenaline pumps - first Romney becomes nonstrategic and unfocused.  Second - he has to have the last word (Crowley saying Governor, please take your seat).   I believe subconsciously, women voters are not impressed with a man that "has to have the last word."  I'm expecting a lot more of this tactic.

This rings true -- about what Obama was doing, and how Romney reacted. In a few hours we'll have a better idea of whether it was a concerted strategy on Obama's part, and whether Romney has thought about the ways he should respond.

There is plenty of guidance on our site, and elsewhere, about what subjects should come up for discussion at tonight's final debate. Please read!

But if, after you've tanked up on substance, you find yourself still hankering for a little gamesmanship / slugfest-strategy analysis, it's worth considering the note below, from a reader in California. It's possible that the reader is over-thinking this, and that he's imagined an approach more complex than what the Obama side really had thought through. But maybe not, and it provides one more angle to watch for this evening. Emphasis added:

I was re-reading the transcript and re-watching the second debate. I think much has been made of the weariness of Obama in the first debate, the tired body language. However, in the analysis of the debates, people have somewhat missed the most striking development.

The Obama staff figured out, in the second debate, both Mitt Romney's largest technical weakness, and how it fits into a loophole in the debate format. Obama back-loaded substance in almost every question asked in debate #2. That is to say, he would routinely make light, bland, mostly conventional talking points, and save the actual confrontation of substance for the rebuttal or follow-up sequence. This forced Romney to bicker and interrupt constantly, and it remains true from the first question on. On women's rights, Obama starts middle of the road, and then in the rebuttal, hits him on contraception. On Libya, he opens with boilerplate, Romney comes back, and then Obama hits him with the coffins and offense. Finally, the strategies in their last answers. Obama saved the 47 percent for when he knew Romney could not respond, which is already widely acknowledged. What is less acknowledged is this strategy was employed through the entirety of the debate.

It's a key flaw in how Romney operates. If you throw a boilerplate answer out, he will feel safe and respond with boilerplate. If you throw a knife, he will want to respond with a knife. If you time this correctly, however, and open with boilerplate with the intention to follow up with a knife, he isn't prepared. He is a reactive debater (ie. Kennedy on guns, Romney was prepared for it and took him to task). They key the Obama staff has figured out is that they have to open by giving him nothing that merits a reaction, because he is much weaker in the follow-up back & forth round, and his personal body language and tics come out significantly more.

I believe now that they see the opening, they will follow it in debate 3. Example: Libya. The President opens the same way, saying he'll take responsibility. Romney opens with his lines, probably trying to retroactively correct Crowley. Then, and only then, does Obama hit him with Issa's document dump putting people in jeopardy, the Republican party's adamant politicization of everything, maybe even the Allen memo to his employees. Essentially, using two minutes of rebuttal space to hit Romney not just with the substance, but with the broader theme of a party that holds nothing sacred. And they will throw this into the moderator's discussion time, which Romney still does not understand is not the same format as the opening gambits or, at the least, is still not as comfortable in.

The Romney team, I assume, has seen this issue and is trying to correct it. But it's a bit harder, because I think it's an innate thing, like Romney stuttering over his n's. He believes the the debate works like Person A speaks, Person B speaks, Person A speaks, Person B Speakers. The Obama team has figured out however, that the format works Person A speaks, Person B Speaks, Person A & Person B speak, and by back-loading the substance, forced Romney into a listening position for much of the second half of the confrontation.

Again, by the time of the third debate, the stagecraft and performance surprises are largely behind us, and the answers on substance matter all the more. But stagecraft, strategy, and presentation still make a difference, and this note offers one more thing to think about tonight and talk about tomorrow. (Then, starting at 10:30pm EDT, I'll skip the-post debate chatter and switch channels to watch the Giants win.)

In rounds One and Two of the presidential debates, more attention was on how Mitt Romney and Barack Obama presented themselves than on the specific policy points they were trying to make. You might say that a focus on atmospherics and performance is shallow-minded or willed by a politically obsessed press. I'd reply that for better or worse it is the way these encounters have always worked. Anything we don't already know about a tax plan or foreign-policy decision we're unlikely to learn during a debate. What we do have in these encounters is a chance to see how two candidates deal with each other, and with real-time pressure, and with sometimes unexpected questions or challenges.

Often third debates are less revealing on these personal-dynamics fronts, because each candidates has become familiar with the opponent's moves and the format as a whole. Sometimes actual points of policy force their way into our consciousness! Toward that end, a friend with a long career as a scholar of and participant in national politics sends this wish-list for the themes the candidates should be made to discuss. He writes:

 I wish you or your colleagues would convince Bob Schieffer to add defense topics to his announced list for the Monday debate.

Here's the list of broad topics issued by Schieffer:

• America's role in the world
• Our longest war -- Afghanistan and Pakistan
• Red lines -- Israel and Iran
• The changing Middle East and the new face of terrorism -- I
• The changing Middle East and the new face of terrorism -- II
• The rise of China and tomorrow's world

What's missing? Big stuff.
 
No questions on the Pentagon or defense spending -- a clear point of difference between the candidates.
 
No questions on the criteria for the use of force, whether in Iran or Syria or ... Mexico.
 
No questions on the war powers of the President, either regarding Iran or drones or targeted killings.
 
No questions on civil-military relations.

Maybe Schieffer will shoehorn some of these issues into his announced topics, or maybe the candidates will broaden their answers. I hope so. Otherwise, this will be a truncated and woefully inadequate one.

In a similar vein, William Astore, a retired Air Force officer who now teaches history, explains what he wishes the candidates would address:

Here's something I'd like to see this campaign season: our two major party candidates debating our wars rather than ignoring them. Both President Obama and Governor Romney prefer to praise the troops rather than to address the tragic consequences of continuing military action in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The latter, when they're addressed at all, are reduced to sound bites and homilies about the need to "stay the course" and "support our troops."

Praising our military while ignoring the wars we send them to is perhaps the biggest shame of American political discourse today (and that is indeed saying a lot). 

I'm not sure this is the biggest shame -- the absence of climate change from this "choosing our future" discussion is certainly a contender. But the problem Astore writes about is real. Dear Bob Schieffer: I know you'll prepare seriously for this discussion. But give a look to these suggestions as you do so.

As a bonus two-point update (from inside a car! in China! an unfortunate first -- but at least I'm not driving) of the two earlier debate points:

1) The Obama team had clearly thought about one long-term tic in Mitt Romney's debate demeanor: His apparently uncontrollable vulnerability to being flustered if he thinks the "rules" are not being enforced. "I'm speaking ... it's my turn." Thus pictures like this, with Romney in a "teacher! teacher!" mode. This is the counterpart to the iconic picture of the first debate, which was Obama looking downcast and downward with a scowl. If I had more time I'd dig up one of those pics.

I said last week that the unimpressive Obama first-debate performance didn't seem any different on a night's reflection than it had while underway.

For me it's not the same with the VPs. My sense of the sheer political effect of the debate hasn't changed from the real-time impression. I don't think either Joe Biden or Paul Ryan moved many voters from one camp to the other, which is generally the pattern with VP debates. Ryan did enough to reassure his voters; Biden did the more urgently necessary and politically significant job of charging up depressed Democrats. Now it's up to Obama and Romney again.

But on the fine grain:

- For years I have been skeptical of whether Paul Ryan's depth on any issue mastered his braniac image in a mainly sympathetic press. I mostly agree with Conor Friedersdorf about the notable things Ryan said, or didn't say, or didn't know about foreign policy. Eg, as Friedersdorf puts it:

[For the current GOP] geopolitical events unfold according to a simple, predictable model. Do you believe that America is an exceptional nation, that this must be an American century, that Iran cannot get a bomb, and that Israel is our closest ally? If so, everything will work out. It is a testament to the malleability of language that we now call this ideology "conservative."

- As Charles Pierce argues, it is fair to compare Ryan's foreign-policy sophistication to Sarah Palin's. We can ask why she was mocked for her "I can see Russia" line and he has not been for comparably bald statements about Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Russia, or the practically unmentioned China.

- I agree with Michael Tomasky that the debate format could use another look. Martha Raddatz was overall very admirable, but her final question was Oprahesque: "If you are elected, what could you both give to this country as a man, as a human being, that no one else could?" That is fine for Oprah, but this was not the Oprah show (and is not the way Raddatz spent the first half of the debate). Both Ryan and Biden quickly figured out that the only appropriate response to this opening was standard "eager to serve" blather.

Another of her closing questions was about the the candidates' personal religious views, as two Catholics. In practice, Biden made the most of this opportunity, by reaffirming the bedrock founding-of-America principle that we must recognize the distinction between personal religious convictions and public-policy views. But I thought the question itself was based on a premise that both candidates should have challenged: that it was in any way appropriate to grill them during an election on matters of personal faith. I know, you can't please everybody -- but it was almost as if a previous Catholic candidate for national office had never addressed this issue. (See also Ed Kilgore on this point.) Here is Raddatz's question:

We have two Catholic candidates, first time, on a stage such as this. And I would like to ask you both to tell me what role your religion has played in your own personal views on abortion.

Please talk about how you came to that decision. Talk about how your religion played a part in that. And, please, this is such an emotional issue for so many people in this country...

RYAN: Sure.

RADDATZ: ... please talk personally about this, if you could.

Here is what another Catholic candidate said 52 years ago:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

I have received a bunch of mail from readers who say that they're still undecided -- but shouldn't be mocked in the way SNL so memorably did. Will get to that in a while.

A little while ago I posted a debate-prep sheet for Joe Biden, suggested by someone who hopes that he wins tonight's debate and that his ticket wins next month's election.

Here's a contrary, Plan B set of suggestions, from a former Republican political staffer who now lives in the swing state of Wisconsin. Compare and contrast (emphasis added):

Your debate prep sheet, frankly, sounds like one you would use if you were debating Paul Ryan. [Hey, remember, it's from someone else, not me.] It wouldn't be the best one for you, and it isn't for Biden, either.

Voters' eyes glaze over at references to Washington think tanks and which ideas were bipartisan 20 years ago.  If references to the Clinton years were a knockout punch for Democrats, the whole GOP would be knocked out by now.  He just wasn't as popular as Democratic political types remember.

Look.  Barack Obama got elected because, and only because, George W. Bush was such a disaster as President.  Mitt Romney has adopted, point for point, the entire platform Bush ran on in 2004, and that John McCain inherited from Bush in 2008.  Romney never challenged Bush on anything; neither did Ryan, and Ryan has, along with every Republican in Congress, fought Obama on everything he's tried to do to help millions of Americans blasted by the worst recession in 80 years.  The only alternative they offered was tax cuts for their party's largest campaign contributors and, this year, tax cuts for their own candidate.

The recession was Bush's fault.  Iraq was Bush's fault.  Katrina was Bush's fault.  Romney and Ryan are both Bush Republicans, neither one of them having done any reflection or reassessment of the disaster the last Republican President inflicted on the country.  Romney = Bush.

I have never understood Barack Obama's prissy avoidance of that equation.  Right now, when the Democrats could still lose the election, would be a good time to leave prissy behind.  Bush was and remains very unpopular.  So is the Republican brand, largely because of Bush.  For good measure, so is Congress, in which Ryan serves.  You want to leave all those weapons unfired because you think it matters to voters that the Heritage Foundation once talked about health care mandates?

Obama, a product on his class, thinks very highly of himself.  He probably thinks he is President because voters in 2008 shared that high opinion, but all that happened for years ago was that Obama was given the benefit of the doubt by a country badly soured on George Bush and his party.  If Romney represented the kind of distancing from Bush that Ronald Reagan did in 1980 from Richard Nixon and Watergate, equating the GOP ticket with Bush's administration wouldn't work.  Romney doesn't.  This line of attack will work.

If Democrats have to work in a reference to Bill Clinton to keep the old goat from losing it on some talk show, maybe Biden can say the last Democratic President is out there campaigning for Obama.  Where is George Bush?

I had all sorts of rococo viewer's-guide suggestions before the initial Obama-Romney debate last week. Obama is a great orator but only a so-so debater; Romney a so-so orator at best but often a very strong debater; yet Romney is vulnerable to gaffes when taken by surprise; and yet some other things. You can read it for yourself.

I will be really interested to see Joe Biden and Paul Ryan tonight, but my expectations are much simpler: I think they'll both do a good job. They know each other, they both like mixing it up, each has experience talking himself into a corner and (more or less) out again. It should be entertaining. That's as much twelve-dimensional-chess pre-game insight as you'll get from me.

On the other hand, a reader in Florida who has spent a lot of time thinking and writing about rhetoric sends in this tip-sheet on what Joe Biden needs to do, in the wake of Obama's showing last week. You can print this out for quick guidance while watching tonight -- "print it out" being a quaint anachronism that includes just keeping it open a browser window -- and then tick the points off if Biden makes them. I figure that after last week's debate the GOP side doesn't need any tips.
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I have three major thoughts [for Biden] on the upcoming VP debate:

1) Viewers absolutely need to hear the jobs numbers that are shown graphically on the Obama campaign's private-sector jobs chart. VP Biden simply needs to say: "The day Obama was inaugurated, we were losing more than 800,000 private-sector jobs a month. Two months after the stimulus was passed (with ZERO Republican votes), the private-sector job losses were less than half that number.  And after only one year in office, with no help at all from Republicans in Congress, we had totally reversed the private-sector job-loss trend, created positive private-sector job growth and have continued that trend right through this latest jobs report. Our policies ARE working, and we will fully restore the American economy in a second term whether Congressional Republicans help us or not!
 

2) VP Biden should also remind voter REPEATEDLY that the unemployment rate would have been 1% or more lower if the President had gotten his requests for public-sector funding approved. Why is this so relevant? Because in every recession for the last several decades (note: fact check needed), public-sector spending ROSE under Republican presidents, as a logical economic response to a recession.

• Implication: Republicans believe that spending on public-sector hiring is good when a Republican is president, but bad when it's a Democratic president- pure politics again.
• Implication: this recession could have been far milder, and the job losses far milder if Republicans had agreed to the same measures that they use when Republican presidents are in office.
  

3) VP Biden should use any reference to Obamacare to REPEATEDLY note that: a) the basic idea was created by the Heritage Foundation, conservative bastion, in the early 1990s as a response to Hillary Clinton's single-payer efforts; b) that Romney's and Obama's legislation followed the Heritage formula; c) Republican senators who served between 1992-2010 (with Biden) supported this legislation when it was a Republican idea, and then unanimously rejected it when it was a Democratic president; and d) its Heritage pedigree and Obama's adoption make it an inherently bi-partisan bill. President Obama IS bi-partisan- with the real Republican Party that Joe Biden knew when Bill Clinton was president; not the extremist Republican Party that compromises on nothing and cannot act in a bi-partisan fashion.

• Implication: Obamacare was a conservative idea, and the Congressional Republicans simply became hyper-partisan and sacrificed governing for politics.
• Implication: Biden saw the transformation of a centrist Republican Party into an extremist faction.
• Implication: When the Republican Party actually governed, instead of obstructed, the country did well (Clinton economy)....
  

I believe that these talking points, hammered over and over, favor Joe Biden's style.

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Last week, I watched in laboratory-isolation conditions: no Twitter feed, no email, no Internet, no commentary, just the debate stream. Tonight my wife and I will be watching with politically interested friends, and I'll weigh in tomorrow.

And, if you'd like a different kind of guide, I turn you over to our friends from Taiwan at NMA. Yes, you could criticize this video for various sorts of "false equivalence." But parts of it are pretty funny.

My interpretation of President Obama's first-debate setback has been different from Andrew Sullivan's. But we are absolutely as one in marveling at this "here's how you do it" lesson from Bill Clinton on dealing with Mitt Romney's new version of himself and his policies.



Thanks to Andrew for turning this up.

Bonus historical point: of the thousands of factors that contributed to George W. Bush becoming president in 2000, an important one was Al Gore's distaste for framing his campaign as a plea for a third Clinton term -- Clinton himself would have been re-elected if eligible -- and fully unleashing Clinton on the campaign trail. The result in Tennessee might have been different if Clinton had worked the circuit there. Or in Arkansas, or Florida, or New Hampshire, etc, any one of which would have kept the election from ever getting into the hands of Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and O'Connor. You can understand Gore's reluctance -- sort of. He was furious at Clinton for the gross indiscipline and deception of the Lewinsky episode; and of course he wanted to win not a Third Clinton but a First Gore term.

Obama might also prefer to run this campaign without sharing any of the limelight with Clinton. Several differences make it easier for him than it was for Gore to let the Big Dog back onto the stage, including the passage of time, and the fact that he was never directly in Bill Clinton's shadow. Still, it showed something good about both the Obama and the Clinton family temperaments that Barack Obama invited Hillary Clinton into his cabinet, after their bitter campaign. (And something very good about her that she has performed as she has.) And it's to the credit of all Obamas and Clintons that the sitting president is using the former president this way.

TL;DR version: It's a wonderful, funny clip.

Your post-debate list of talking points, complete with historic videos:

• During the debate and immediately afterwards, I felt, along with most people, that Mitt Romney had performed very well, and Barack Obama quite poorly. The wisdom that comes from a full 16+ hours of perspective does not change that view.
  
• Everyone is offering explanations for what happened to Obama. Among many others, two worth checking on our site are from Garance Franke-Ruta and Derek Thompson.
  
• The award for most disgraceful debate interpretation goes to a perennial favorite in this category, John Sununu, who told Andrea Mitchell that Obama had done poorly because he was "lazy."
  
• The iron law of political coverage is "the story has to change." For several weeks the story had been: Romney gaffes, widening Obama lead. It was going to change one way or another last night. A bad Romney night might have led to a "time for a landslide!" tone. Now it's "Obama shocked, new spring in Romney's step."
• The story will change again. Already we're getting the "hey, don't go overboard on the Romney Knockout" theme. If the Obama team is lucky or successful, the next story will be: Pyrrhic victory for Romney, as many of his claims last night get picked apart. If Romney is lucky, the story will remain: Obama on the slippery slope toward defeat. And of course tomorrow's job numbers will be worked into either theme. 
  
• A lot of what Romney said cried out for real-time challenge, follow-up, or "wait a minute!" rebuttal. I am not at all in the "it was Jim Lehrer's fault" camp, because I respect Lehrer's decision not to assign himself follow-up interrogator duties. He was there to let the principals interact, and that is what he did. An incumbent president should have been fully prepared to handle the follow-up chores.
• Learning from the past, 1980 edition: The first time I heard Mitt Romney make the "he's going to cut $716 billion out of Medicare" claim last night, I mouthed the response I assumed the President was going to give: "There you go again." Surely they had this one ready. Right? Right? Lest we forget:

• Learning from the past, last month edition: Here is another way to handle that $716 billion claim. Every single line of this was available to the Obama prep team. Lest we forget this one too:
  

Here endeth my debate analysis for a while.