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The second Presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama provided a very precise summary of the 2012 campaign so far. It demonstrated the candidates' strengths and revealed their weaknesses. And it illuminated the frustration that many informed voters have had with this race: Romney's proposals for the next four years are ridiculous; the President's are nonexistent.



I've always believed that the town-meeting debate is the most important event of the fall campaign. It has produced the most memorable moments: Bill Clinton's empathy, Bush the Elder's glance at his watch, Al Gore's stalking of Bush the Younger. It's where the public gets to see the candidates actually dealing with their fellow citizens. It is, I believe, the moment when a great many people viscerally decide which candidate they want to invite into their homes for the next four years.

But I must say: this year's edition was the most tepid I can remember, in terms of interaction between the candidates and the live audience. In 1992, Clinton hit his empathy mark not by taking the famous steps toward a woman who had asked an anguished question about the economy, but by asking her a question: How had the economy affected her? There were no such moments in 2012. Quite the opposite, in fact. At one point, the President pretty much ignored a question about gasoline prices. Indeed, the candidates seemed more concerned with each other than with the audience--and that too seems a metaphor for the 2012 campaign: our political system is increasingly self-absorbed, myopic and remote from the realities of daily life.

Overall, the President was the stronger candidate in the debate, as he has been for most of the year. He was a more forceful presence. It was, I think, his best debate performance since his first confrontation with John McCain in 2008, when he turned McCain's perceived strength--foreign policy--into trigger-happy weakness. And once again, foreign policy provided him with his strongest moment: his splendid takedown of Romney's foolish attempt to turn the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya into a political issue. "The suggestion," Obama said, "that ... anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we've lost four of our own, Governor, is offensive."

And then Romney's intermittent relationship with factual accuracy--another enduring feature of this year's campaign--allowed the President to take it a step further. Romney accused Obama of making a false statement when he claimed to have called the attack "an act of terror" the day after it occurred. Romney was dead wrong, a victim of his campaign's--and the right-wing media's--tendency to turn molehills into anthills. After the debate, the infantile pedants at Fox News were debating whether an act of "terror" was the same as a "terrorist attack." This is the sort of right-wing casuistry that has marked not only the 2012 campaign but nearly every day that Obama has served in office.

The experts will say that Romney's Libya debacle came during the least watched portion of the debate, the last half hour, but it will be replayed in perpetuity. And the President also had strong moments in the first half hour: He took apart Romney's tax-cut proposal, which is a masterpiece of supply-side flummery. He reminded voters of the extreme positions on women's issues and immigration that Romney took in order to win the Republican nomination. His low-key power contrasted well with Romney's occasionally stiff intensity.

Romney's best moments also reflected the strongest aspects of his candidacy. He returned to the economic argument he made at the very beginning of the campaign--before he was lured into the Tea Party fever swamp--that the President had been ineffective in pulling the country out of the Great Recession. Twice, he launched into powerful litanies of Obama's failures: persistent unemployment, slow economic growth, no long-term deficit-reduction plan, an increase in government regulation. These assaults were abetted by Obama's continuing failure to talk about what he would do during the next four years. Indeed, the President actually said at one point that he needed a second term to continue the things he had started in the first term. Which raised the question, What if you're a voter who has had a lousy time the past four years?

And that is where the bloodlessness of this race, and these two candidates, is most jarring. This is a nation that has been rocked by recent events. It is begging for a plausible vision of the future. But this has been neither a big nor a truly national campaign. The vast majority of people in the vast majority of states are irrelevant to the process. The campaigns brag about their ability to microtarget voters. That is precisely what we've gotten: a whole lot of micro at a time when macro is sorely needed. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2127200,00.html

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