The first debate between Mitt Romney and the President will be on 3 October and in most ways it will be for Romney the Grand Final, Superbowl and World Series all in one. I don’t know what it will actually mean to “win” the debate, but on past observation, the major test is merely to look presidential. You don’t have to look more commanding or show more authority. The bleak facts of the situation are well enough known to all. It will therefore be, I think, only necessary for Romney to show he has what it takes to do the job, that he has policies that are in tune with the needs of the time, and not to say anything that will fall into the territory of a major blunder.

Newt Gingrich has his own advice, and having lost in the debates to Romney, he may not be the ideal person from whom such advice should be taken. Nevertheless, he has had his successes and they have all stemmed from a rhetorical genius the led to the first Republican House majority since the Eisenhower administration. You can read the whole article here, which is mostly a history of past debates, but which finishes with suggestions for Romney. I have only included the topic headings used by Gingrich. If you are interested, you can read it all yourself.

Relax and be prepared

Be assertive and be on offense against both Obama and his media

Be honest

Use humor

Enjoy the evening

The only part of Gingrich’s advice I will mention in full is his advice about the media. What to do is anyone’s guess. Romney knows as well as anyone just how poisonous the media are and how they long for a genuine mistake to pillory him over. But he has his advisers and they have done the focus groups so they too have a strategy. For what it’s worth, these are Gingrich’s suggestions in full on how to deal with the media:

You can be on offense without being offensive.

The strongest reactions I got to my debates came from people who were desperate for someone to stand up to the media and redefine the questions and reframe the assumptions.

Americans are sick and tired of the unending liberalism and suffocating groupthink of the elite media.

If you look at my strongest applause lines virtually every one was taking on the media.

It is inevitable the media will ask Romney about ‘the 47 percent.’ Instead of answering it, Romney should pivot and say, ‘Let me tell you about the 100 percent. Obama has failed the 100 percent who have to buy gasoline. Obama has failed the 100 percent who will be paying interest on the Obama national debt for the rest of their lives. Obama has failed 100 percent of those who want to get a job and move on with their lives. Obama has failed everyone in the Middle East who had hoped the Arab Spring would lead to freedom by allowing it to turn into an Islamist winter.’

The country would be electrified.

Doesn’t seem so electrifying to me. Slow and steady wins the race which is the advice I would give. I think Romney’s already in a winning position. He now just has to close the deal.

Eventually it had to happen that things said by the media become mere noise and make no impact on the right side of the political divide. There is a Politico article today, commented on by Jonathan Tobin, in which the author cannot believe Republicans not only haven’t already conceded the election, but will moreover continue to fight it out to the end. And this is so, even though the media have already, and on more than one occasion, declared some statement by Romney as a blunder that has finally finished his run for president. Here is Tobin discussing this media syndrome:

Let’s get this straight: The media decides that Romney’s gaffe about the 47 percent defines the election while Obama’s gaffes about the murders of Americans being ‘bumps in the road’ isn’t worth discussing. They push this line about Romney’s incompetence relentlessly; accept speeches filled with misstatements and distortions at the Democratic National Convention at face value after treating GOP convention speeches as ‘fact-checked’ lies and help manufacture a post-convention bounce; and then declare the race (which is still largely within the margin of error in most polls) over and consider it a ‘curiosity’ that Republicans still like their chances and understand tying their fates to Romney is a lot smarter than writing him off. In other words, if the GOP doesn’t accept their narrative and give up, they are in denial. It never occurs to the chattering classes that about half the country still plans to vote to turn President Obama’s incomplete into an ‘F’ in November and that his wife shouldn’t be fitted for her second inaugural gown just yet.

Most journalists at best have only a second rate social sciences degree, usually from some university in which its social sciences departments have been taken over by the far left. That’s why we are getting to the stage where people on the right side of the ledget won’t just ignore such people but will actively disdain their views and mistrust anything they write.

Journalists are not the arbiters of right and wrong, good and bad, true and false. Unless they are recognisably identifiable as not being of the socialist, collectivist tribe, the virtual certainty is that they are – just stand-ins for the parties of the left. Why anyone should pay attention to what they say or report is beyond me.

It is now beyond any kind of sense that support for this man as President has not completely evaporated. What does he offer, because whatever it is, it’s not blood, toil, tears and sweat. This is what Obama did in September instead of meeting with world leaders, or anything else for that matter.

[Via Instapundit and Doug Ross]

I have a long article at Quadrant Online dealing with the two hidden aspects of the American election I think are not given their due: the corrupt role of the media and Obama’s far left mentors. These are the opening paras:

The American election will be one for the ages. At the very centre is the question, does Barack Obama truly represent the mainstream of the American ethos and its core beliefs as they now are, here at the start of the twenty-first century? The election will not just be about Obama’s policies themselves, bad as they certainly would be, nor will it be about the almost impossibility of reversing the course that will have been taken if Obama is re-elected, which will indeed be nigh on irreversible.

No, the election will be about whether the United States is any longer the country it once was, a country of free markets and a free people. A United States that can elect Barack Obama once is on the edge of a precipice. To elect him for the second time knowing everything we now know from his first four years as president means the US has gone over the edge.

The march through the institutions that began in the 1960s will have been finally completed. The ethos of an America that will not only be free itself but ensure whatever is necessary to maintain freedom in as much of the world as can be retrieved will have gone. We, in our till now free societies, will be largely on our own with no major power to shield us from totalitarian winds of every kind and gusting from all directions.

Barack Obama is a socialist of the most radical leftist kind. His mentors, just to name the three most prominent, were Frank Marshall, Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers. That the vast majority of the population has no idea who these people are, or the role they played in Obama’s life, is in turn a consequence of the deep leftward turn of the American media forging ahead in step with the social sciences division of the major educational institutions of the United States. The commanding heights of the intellectual world have been taken over by the left and they have created an environment all but impossible to break through. It is only common sense in combination with the disastrous outcomes that leftist policies inevitably lead to that creates the hope that trends now in place can be turned round and reversed. The institutional structure of the United States permits change driven from below if it becomes widely understood that change is necessary. That is the story of this election. Will the American people see the danger in time or will they continue in the direction of the likely ruin that a second Obama administration would bring?

You can read the whole thing here.

The following is an edited transcript from the Question and Answer session in that infamous meeting with Republicans behind closed doors. You know, the one that mentioned the 47%. The transcript was compiled and published in The New York Post. If you have the patience for it all (it goes nine pages followed by four pages of journalist comments which don’t add that much) you should read it through. If you have any doubts whether Mitt Romney has what it takes to be a great president, this will put those doubts to rest.

Here is just a sample. He is responding to those who believe that winning ought to be a simple matter of going for the jugular. Romney has a different view. From his reply you can better understand the direction the campaign has taken and why.

Man in audience: . . . I wanna see you take the gloves off and talk to people that actually read the paper, that read the book and care about knowing the facts and — knowledge is power. As opposed to people that are swayed by, you know, what sounds good at the moment. You know, I — if you turned into a — like eager to kill, it would be a landslide, in my humble opinion.

Romney: Well, I wrote a book that lays out my view for what has to happen in the country and people who are fascinated by policy will read the book. We have a website that lays out white papers on a whole series of issues that I care about.

I have to tell you, I don’t think this will have a significant impact on my electability. I wish it– I wish it did, but I think our ads will have a much bigger impact and the debates will have a big impact.

. . . My dad used to say, “Being right early is not good in politics.” And . . . discussion of a whole series of important topics typically doesn’t win elections. And there are– for instance, this president won because of “hope and change.”

. . . I can say this, which — and I’m sure you’ll agree with this as well — we speak with voters across the country about their perceptions. Those people I told you, the 5%, to 6% or 7% that we have to sort of bring on our side? They all voted for Barack Obama four years ago.

So — and, by the way, when you ) when you say to them, “Do you think Barack Obama is a failure?” they overwhelmingly say, “No.” They like him. But when you say, “Are you disappointed that his policies haven’t worked?” they say, “Yes.” And because they voted for him they don’t wanna be told that they were wrong. That he’s a bad guy. That he did bad things. That he’s corrupt.

Those people that we have to get, they want to believe they did the right thing but he just wasn’t up to the task. They love the phrase that he’s over his head.

. . . But, you see, you and I, we spend our day with Republicans. We spend our days with people who agree with us. And these people are people who voted for him and don’t agree with us.

An so the things that animate us are not the things that animate them. And the best success I have in speaking with those people is saying, you know, “The president’s been a disappointment. He told you he’d keep unemployment below 8%. Hasn’t been below 8% since. 50% of kids coming out of school can’t get a job. 50%. 50% of the kids in high school in our 50 largest cities won’t graduate from high school. What are they gonna do?”

And the — these are the kinds of things that I can say to that audience that — that they nod they head and say, “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

What he’s gonna do, by the way, is try and vilify me as someone who’s been successful. Or who’s, you know, closed businesses or laid people off and this is an evil bad guy. And that may work. I actually think that right now people are saying, “I want someone who can make things better. That’s what — that’s gonna motivate me. Who can get jobs for my kids and get rising incomes.” And I hope to be able to be the one that wins that battle.

These are wonderful creations but what always worries me is whether they are able to draw anyone across from the other side. If you find this instantly funny and you see the point right away, you were never going to vote for Obama anyway. Since at this stage it is almost impossible to see Obama’s attraction for anyone, the ridicule that this little story heaps on Obama is unlikely to penetrate the defenses of anyone who is still in the Democrat camp.

Do these people really believe that a market economy is bad for their economic fortunes? Do they think that the brief flurry of a downturn in 2009 is the defining moment for the capitalist system and that they would willingly give it all away for the stability that socialism promises but does not anyway deliver? Do they not recognise that whatever it has been Obama has done to bring about a recovery has been a dismal failure? Are they so stuck in the rut of government transfers that even if they understand the harm Obama’s policies have done they are not prepared to shift?

And then on foreign policy, can anyone any longer believe that the US remains as secure today as it was four years ago? Do none of Obama’s supporters look at the Middle East and wonder how much worse it could have been under a Republican? Are they just that oblivious to the disastrous trend in American foreign policy under Hilary Clinton that they would still cling to Obama in the belief that Romney could be worse?

That the media and the academic world of the social sciences continue to support Obama only make me wonder whether graduates from arts and humanities courses actually learn anything worth knowing. How you would make such supposedly knowledgeable and intelligent people shift their vote is the greatest conundrum of them all, for which no answer is available. No answer at all.

There has been quite a bit of focus on Mitt Romney’s having mentioned that 47% of the American population do not pay income taxes. And much of the commentary has been that he made the comment behind closed doors and out of hearing of most of the population. But the fact is that Romney had made the same comment and had made the same point in his book, No Apology, which was published in 2010. This is directly from Romney’s text (page 303).

In light of the challenges faced by the country, I am puzzled by those who align themselves with a political agenda that may be well intentioned, but that weakens the country and hazards our freedom.

First, however, there are people who correctly presume that they will get more money from governments if it is run by Democrats. I understand these kinds of Democrats very well. Adam Lerrick of the American Enterprise Institute calculated for The Wall Street Journal that under candidate Obama’s tax plan, 49 percent of all Americans will pay no income tax. Added to that number are 11 percent who would pay federal income tax of less than 5 percent of their income. So for 60 percent of Americans, spending restraint and lower taxes championed by Republicans may not mean a great deal to them personally – at least in the short term, even though the lower taxes promote economic growth, good jobs and higher incomes.

There is nothing here other than the recognition that those who do not pay tax are less inclined to vote for a candidate that promises to cut the taxes they already do not pay and who receive large transfers from the hands of government. This is a major problem both economically and politically and it does need to be recognised. But it was hardly a revelation to find that Romney has re-stated in public what he wrote in his book and is what everyone has long known but is seldom said.