Review writers respond to the final presidential debate:
Mike Navarro:
The truest thing said tonight after the debate was that if you had been on an island for the past four years and saw this debate, you would have thought that Mitt Romney was the incumbent and Barack Obama was the challenger. Once again, Romney appeared to be the more presidential of the two candidates. To be honest, I felt that Obama started strong. To be even MORE honest, I felt that this was the strongest debate performance that Obama has ever delivered.
He still could not beat Mitt Romney.
This election will go down to the wire, but I genuinely believe that Mitt Romney is the best choice for and all of our futures, as well as my own.
Noah Kantro:
Obama: Can anyone take this man seriously anymore? He talks and talks and talks but there are four years of history contradicting his words at every turn. He is supposed to deal intimately with these foreign policy issues every day, yet it is his Achilles’ heel. The Middle East, stabilized? Oblivious. The economy, strong? Laughable. Israel, closer than ever? Fantasy. Iran’s nuclear program brought to its knees? Since when? Every objective analysis and report screams a more dangerous, unstable, and anti-American world. Obama’s frantic cries to the contrary and attacks against Mitt do nothing to change the truth—his policies have failed, the country is weaker, and four more years can do nothing but push us closer to the fiscal cliff.
Romney: The challenger continues to impress. While not as strong as his first appearance, and by position not as knowledgeable of the government’s inner workings over the past four years, Romney showed a clear and cogent knowledge of the issues and laid out a clear vision for economic and thereby foreign resurgence. He deftly deflected the CinC’s attacks and refocused the debate on the tried and true vision of peace through strength at the essence of foreign policy.
Schieffer: Thank you to the most calm, composed, and intelligent moderator of the campaign.
Misha Checkovich:
It’s clear that the wind is at Mitt Romney’s back heading into the final stretch of the election. Tonight, he looked and sounded more presidential by far than the current president, and that ties into the larger theme of a tired and backward Obama administration (despite all their protestations otherwise) that has run out of ideas and the steam to execute the remaining ones effectively. What irked me the most was Obama’s continuous pivots back to sinking federal dollars and tentacles into local matters—and thinking that if only we could just hire more teachers and retrofit more cars we could get ourselves out of this malaise. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney looked tremendous, had great, optimistic energy, and conveyed the temperament necessary for being a serious player on the world stage. Barack Obama started his career organizing the rougher neighborhoods of Chicago. Now he’s “organizing the international community”, with roughly the same results—a descent into violence, a disintegration of the social fabric, and the complete abdication of the responsibility that comes with the job of the presidency.
