Politics is a long game

squashed:

A lot of very intelligent progressives are unhappy that Obama pulled some punches last night. He didn’t throw Romney’s 47% comments back at him. He didn’t force Romney to nail down some of the specifics of his plan. He just laid out a foundation for what he believed and where he differed from Romney. It’s almost as if he thinks there will be a chance to build and elaborate on these themes in some later debate.

As it turns out, this was an awfully reasonable thing to do. If your football team is up by ten in the final quarter, you don’t do a lot of long passes. The risk of interception is too high. In baseball, if you have no strikes and three balls, you can afford to watch a pitch sail over the plate—particularly if the alternative is a pop-fly somebody will catch. In volleyball, the bump, set, spike thing needs to happen in that order.

It’s a bit premature to write obituaries for Obama’s career as an orator. I’d like to see Obama run Romney through the rhetorical sausage grinder as much as the next guy—but I think attempting that during the first debate would have been a serious lapse of judgement.

Well, the good news is the President has nowhere to go but up (at least as far as debates are concerned)…

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426 Notes

  1. keepyourshitttogether reblogged this from apoplecticskeptic
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  6. texarshead reblogged this from truth-has-a-liberal-bias and added:
    Though it would have been nice had he seemed a little more awake for the debate…
  7. gamingtimeladyfromgallifrey reblogged this from brashblacknonbeliever
  8. queenofthewilis reblogged this from kogiopsis
  9. will6cx reblogged this from squashed and added:
    A whole bunch of BS!
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  20. lifeofkj reblogged this from invisiblelad and added:
    Interesting interpretation. We’ll see how it plays out in the analysis and the next debate.
  21. invisiblelad reblogged this from think4yourself and added:
    You’re not the only person speculating this way. Another adjunct prof I work with made a similar suggestion during our...
  22. girlswithincendiaryvices reblogged this from bubonickitten