The first debate between President Barack Obama and GOP candidate Mitt Romney turned out to be the most decisive in the history of presidential debates dating back to 1960. In the week following the debate Romney went from over three points down in the Real Clear Politics average of national polls to take his first ever lead over the President.  

While Obama may still win the election the myth of Barack Obama has been punctured forever. Ever since he burst on the national scene with his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention Obama has been a tabula rasa upon which others projected their fantasies. Despite the slenderness of his resume no accolade proved too grandiose for his supporters.  He was described as the most intelligent man ever to occupy the Oval Office. A 2008 Time cover portrayed him as FDR and a Newsweek cover of the same year as castingLincoln’s shadow. Less than a year into his first term and without a single substantive accomplishment to his name he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

That super-hero image was always wildly implausible. Far from being the greatest presidential orator in history Obama has shown little capacity to persuade. Over 50 speeches on ObamaCare failed to move the needle of public opinion; the more the president spoke the more the American public disapproved of ObamaCare. With few exceptions his speeches are unreadable — platitudinous and devoid of insight — albeit delivered in a sonorous baritone voice.  

The image of the President appearing to shrink physically as the debate wore on deflating in front of a national audience will never be fully erased. His most ardent admirers were his most livid critics. Chris Matthews who once admitted to feeling a “tingle in my leg ” upon listening to the candidate Obama speak demanded to know “Where was Obama tonight?” Andrew Sullivan — “everybody knows how much I love this guy” — was hysterical: “Never has a candidate this late in the campaign so far ahead just thrown in the towel in the way Obama did last week.” Vulgarian Bill Maher who contributed one million dollars to the Obama campaign tweeted that Obama really does need a teleprompter and speculated that his entire contribution had been spent on hallucinogens.

For someone of Obama’s almost unlimited self-regard the ridicule must have been devastating. He once proclaimed his 2008 nomination “the moment that the rise of the oceans began to slow” and has already graded himself as a “near great president.” His announcement of the killing of Osama bin Laden was so relentlessly first person — recalling Mark Twain’s quip that the only thing he could not stand about a certain person was that his “I’s were too close together” — that one would have thought he was a member of the Navy SEALS team that pulled the trigger. Until bluntly informed otherwise by campaign staffers he was the only person inAmericawho thought he had won the debate with Romney.

Now he found himself represented on the cover of New Yorker a hitherto reliable source of Obama hagiography by an empty chair behind a lectern. Even crueler was Michael Ramirez’s cartoon of Romney facing an empty baby chair with a microphone on the tray.

But if Obama proved “too arrogant to take a core campaign responsibility [i.e. debate preparation] seriously” in Sullivan’s words his media acolytes have only themselves to blame. They have cosseted him like no president in history. So accustomed has the President and his team grown to the mainstream media (MSM) insulating him from every criticism and demonizing his opponents that they criticized moderator Jim Lehrer after the debate for not having been more aggressive in challenging Romney’s arguments as if that is the job of the moderator and not the candidate himself. Left face-to-face with Romney without the MSM to protect him Obama was totally unprepared.

Obama came to believe in the aura cast around him by the press once telling an interviewer “I actually believe my own hype.” His lackluster debate performance might serve as an object warning to all parents of how ceaseless efforts to inflate their children’s self-esteem can leave their offspring ill-prepared for all those who will later in life be more inclined to judge them objectively.

THE PRESIDENT’S PERFORMANCE however was only half the story of the debate. The bigger surprise of the evening — at least to long-time Obama-watchers — was how good Romney was: knowledgeable forceful without being rude or disrespectful and genuinely concerned about the plight of tens of millions unemployed and underemployed Americans and about the consequences of the ballooning debt on the younger generation of Americans.

Romney’s commanding presentation will have more impact on the course of the election than the President’s flaccid rambling performance. The biggest obstacle to Obama’s re-election has always been his record. As the incumbent he cannot simply reprise the “hope and change” rhetoric of 2008. His greatest policy achievement ObamaCare remains deeply unpopular. Unemployment has remained above eight percent every month but one of his presidency and the rates among minorities and younger workers are many times that. The GDP’s sluggish rate of growth has declined every year of his presidency even with stimulatory budget deficits of more than a trillion dollars annually.

Unable to run on his record Obama’s only hope was to turn the election away from a referendum on his presidency by portraying Romney as out-of-touch plutocrat interested only in feathering the nest of his fellow “millionaires and billionaires.” The MSM happily went along with this strategy and Romney himself provided some inadvertent support with the “47%” remark.

But the demonization of Romney in Obama campaign commercials and in the MSM could only be effective as long as the larger public did not have a chance to see Romney in action. In the debate Obama eschewed — wisely I think — the personal attacks of his campaign ads perhaps knowing that the well-prepared Romney would have effective rejoinders.

Romney was masterful not only in ticking off the indictment of the economy’s performance under Obama but also in showing how the lack of jobs is not happenstance but the direct result of particular policy choices. He presented both an alternative vision ofAmericaand an outline of how to get there.

The sharp contrast between what the Romney viewers saw and the MSM caricature of him to which they had been exposed gave much more force to his performance.

Asked about a candidate for a particular candidate for a rabbinical position inLithuania Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetzky deliberately neglected to mention his extremely dignified appearance. The townspeople could not fail to notice themselves he reasoned and it would have far greater impact by virtue of being totally unexpected. The pre-debate contempt for Romney only enhanced his performance in the same way.

The chareidi community inIsraelcould learn something from the impact of the Obama-Romney debate. The caricature of us presented in the media actually makes it far easier to leave a positive impression when we engage our fellow Jews on an individual level. Just like the judo black belt who uses his attacker’s force against him we have to use the negative characterizations of us to the Torah’s advantage.

Look how well it worked for Mitt.

It’s Your’s to Lose

Hashem created the world in such a way that we are all interdependent. “No man is an island” as the poet informs us. At the same time we were also created with the sense that dependence on others is inherently degrading. To paraphrase Chazal (Bava Basra 110a) it’s better to flay animal carcasses in the marketplace than to allow oneself to become dependent on others.

Our need for independence can betray us and lead us to rebel against HaKadosh Baruch Hu. Yet as Rav Dessler points out independence is a necessity for the exercise of our bechirah through which we define ourselves and earn our eternal reward.

Financial dependence is only one form of dependence. Any time we make our happiness dependent on anything outside of us — e.g. the acquisition of some material object or the actions or opinions of anyone else — we have made ourselves needy. And when we are needy we have lost possession of the only thing that we can truly own our self.

That is the powerful message I took from the Bubby in the vignette shared by my friend Rabbi Ron Yitzchak Eisenman in last week’s issue who explained to her grandson how she never let her foul-tempered husband take away her equanimity: “Someone can forcibly take away your money your health and even your life. But your self-control is yours forever. When you allow someone to make you angry you become powerless and lose the one thing that Hashem made absolutely yours. Moshele never let anyone make you powerless by making you angry.”

The same day I read Rabbi Eisenman’s “Shul With a View” a friend who grew up across the alley-way from Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv ztz”l told me a story of his absolute self-control. Once when Rav Elyashiv still served on the Beis Din HaGadol of the Chief Rabbinate a local zealot pelted him with eggs and tomatoes as he turned into the alley leading to his home.  

Rabbi Elyashiv looked at the man and told him “I bless you that you should be so busy that you won’t have time for such shtusim (nonsense).” The next year the assailant who was then childless was blessed with quadruplets. Rav Elyashiv would have disdained the miraculous salvation being attributed to his blessing. But the real miracle story is not the birth of the quadruplets but the gadol’s refusal to allow a fool to strip him of his self-control.