Round Two: Hempstead Hoedown

President Obama surprised me by being on top of his game the town-hall presidential debate moderated by Candy Crowley Tuesday night. He was energetic and forceful against Mitt Romney, and he drew clear differences between himself and the Republican presidential nominee on many issues, particularly on women's issues.  As President, he obviously has had no trouble in standing up for equal pay for women, reminding female swing voters that he signed the law making that mandatory, or for Planned Parenthood funding. Romney, in standing up for women, develops back problems.  

Romney, for his part, said he tried to make several efforts to hire women to public offices as as governor of Massachusetts (though the evidence suggests otherwise) and he said his staff brought him "binders" full of women to consider, suggesting he was less interested in their résumés and more interested in their head shots. (The only Massachusetts politician I know of who ever got hired strictly on the basis of a glamour shot, of course, was Senator Scott Brown.) Obama has had no trouble adding women to his team; two of his top diplomats are women, after all.  And when the discourse did move to international relations, Obama claimed to have referred to the murder of U.S. Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens as a terrorist attack immediately after it happened - a charge Romney hoped to refute by saying that the White House had insisted it was a spontaneous killing and not a terrorist attack.  But Crowley remembered that Obama had referred to it as a terrorist attack immediately afterwards, and she told Romney so.

"Can you say that a little louder, Candy?" Obama said, causing the audience in the hall to applaud enthusiastically.

Obama then moved to get himself back in the game once and for all by reminding voters of Romney's "47 percent" remark toward the end. Not only did most pundits - including the very skeptical Andrew Sullivan - agree that Obama turned the tables, he turned this coming Monday's foreign policy debate into a formality-cum-sideshow.

But is it enough? Obama lost a lot of ground in the thirteen days between the first two presidential debates - enough to possibly put Pennsylvania and maybe even Michigan back in the swing state column - and some tracking polls show Romney leading, and comfortably so.  Paradoxically, the forecast Web sites still call for a narrow Obama win in the electoral college; the Huffington Post, FiveThirtyEight.com, and Election Projection predictions, when averaged together, give the President 282 electoral votes, twelve votes more than he needs.  Important issues like climate change didn't come up in the debate - Crowley later admitted that she dropped a question pertaining to that issue when it became apparent that the questions had to pared down - despite the fact that such issues are key deal makers for many voters.  (High-speed rail didn't come up either.)  And the President, while finally touting his accomplishments of the past four years, still hasn't projected a vision for the next four years.  He can't simply say he wants to push the initiatives the Republicans wouldn't let him pass in the current Congress; with the majorities in either chamber unlikely to change parties come January, those same initiatives will die in the next Congress if Obama is re-elected.  And, if he is re-elected, it will be with a narrow margin and not a mandate.

It's too early to tell whether Obama's performance in the second debate reversed or even checked Romney's momentum.  But the President still has to feel better about his chances as a result of it. I'm sorry I ever doubted him.

And if he wins, it may be because Candy Crowley caught Romney in a mistake and fact-checked him live.  The three sixteen-year-old girls from Montclair, New Jersey who petitioned the Commission on Presidential Debates for a female moderator in one of the Obama-Romney face-offs may have altered history in unforeseen ways.  Their interest in such matters of importance should dispel the notion that sixteen-year-old girls only care about makeup, clothes, and boys.

Sixteen-year-old boys, alas, are even less serious.  But they at least have better taste in music.

(One Direction - too easy to go there - and Justin Bieber? Figures . . . ;-) )