Barack Obama looked good yesterday and Mitt Romney not so good.  

The President was not  defensive or deferential.  Romney's five point plan,  he said,  for the economy was essentially a one point plan, the plan which made him very rich and which  his party for  decades has promoted, a revived policy to  "make sure that folks at the top play by a different set of rules." 

Of  course, Romney as a CEO  had pursued such policies by taking  over companies, exporting jobs, and looting  loot pension plans to  make money.   Romney said that he "cares about 100% of the American people" sounded hollow.  His attack on Chinese currency policies and pledge to use tariffs as President against them made litle sense, given China's role as a creditor nation, and sounded more like personal sour grapes, given his role as a finance capitalist. 

 Finally, his angry retort that his "investments" were handled by a" blind trust" which probably had  investments in China and  his haughty response to President Obama, asking him what his "pension" was invested in, which reminded me most of the old capitalist  owner/investor contempt for those who are "on salary" and depend on things like pensions, came across very badly.   "The rich," as the famous line from F. Scott Fitzgerald's  The Great Gatesby, goes, "they are different."

 The president's smiling response that he was sure that his pension was less than Romney's was to put it mildly, an understatement. 

  Romney often   tried to be his old CEO self, interrupting the President with CE0 arrogance, telling a graduating college student worried about finding a job that  in 2014  in a Romney administration "he  would make sure that  student had a job.  Of course, his way to do that was to restore the Reagan-Bush policies of deregulation, detaxation, and happy handshakes for those who export capital and jobs, the disastrous policies that the president struck at over and over again.   

But Romney got into the most trouble I think when he tried to play Ronald Reagan in debates past.

  When Jimmy Carter hit Reagan in 1980 on his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Reagan responded by reminiscing about his youth in Illinois when no one really knew that there was a "race problem" in America and it worked, even through the KKK was in reality running wild in Illinois and much of the U.S. in Reagan's youth in the 1920s. 

In response to a question ,which made  the point that women averaged 72% of the wages and salaries of male workers and employees , the President  answered by emphasizing   the Lily Ledbetter Equal Pay Act, a major achievement of his administration that the Republicans are pledged to repeal.  Romney then sough to  dodge the issue entirely by stating that when he became  Governor of Massachusetts and his staff was only sending him resumes of males for his cabinet, he went to women's groups  and asked(using the old "plain folks" advertising  maneuver,) "can you find us folks and they sent us binders full of women." 

These apparently produced an explosion of internet commentary, including  this one from the aging entrepenuer of adolescent male sex fantasies. Playboy  magazine founder Hugh Hefner(whose wealth based on selling those fantasies in the form of glossy Playboy photograghs over the last six decades, is probably greater than Romneys)  "Binders full of women  Oh Sure,  I've got hundreds of them."

Romney also  proclaimed his support of all women having access to contraceptives under any national health program although the Republicans are committed to permitting employers to "opt out" of providing such coverage, which, besides the issue at hand, I would see as a prelude to a Romney administration policy of permitting employers to provide whatever health coverage they wished for their employees on many questions.

While the debate was clearly a victory for the President, I was struck by the shallowness of the media commentary, the emphasis only on polls, bounces, sound bites, as if everybody saw everything both as a kind of bookmakers's approaches to sports events and  in  and through the lense of the late Alfred McClung Lee's 1930s classic study, The Fine Art of Propaganda.  Unlike Lee, though, who was exposing the techniques used by fascist demagogues and reactionary politicians and governments, here the commentators  on CNN, the New York Times, and everywhere else were  essentially kowtowing to such techniques and judging the candidates entirely on form, with virtually no  commentary on content. 

According to press reports Romney as of now has $170 million to play around in the expected Blitzkrieg in  the "battleground states" of Ohio, Iowa, Nevada, Florida,  whee his campaign hopes to win the majority in the archiac anti-democratic electoral college that will make him President regardless of the popular vote. 

 It will take a concerted effort in those states and everywhere else by those without such wealth, labor and peoples movements, to defeat not only him but, as importantly, the Republicans in House and Senate races so as to give a second Obama administration the possibility of achieving what its core constituents elected it to do, overcome the economic stagnation, mounting inequality and insecurity of the Reagan Bush administrations

Norman Markowitz