Schoolboy Obama crams for debate
Times Of India ^ | 10.16.2012 | Chitinand Rajghata
Posted on Tuesday, October 16, 2012 2:34:10 PM
NEW YORK: Millions of students in India, and indeed across the world, can take heart and derive inspiration by the hard slog that US presidential candidates put in as part of their preparation for White House occupancy. And that includes the grind that the incumbent president, whose four years in office you think would already have made him a master of all subjects , is put through.
Evidently not. Turns out that not only is President Obama's four-year record up for scrutiny, he has also to make an even stronger case for another four years while putting his opponent on the mat, particularly after his casual sparring during the first debate raised doubts about his intensity and passion for the job. And so, through the weekend, while much of America was enjoying fall weather, the world's most powerful man was locked up in a 17th century rural Virginia plantation resort, cramming for an examination with the diligence of a school boy approaching board exams.
The second debate will take place on Tuesday night (Wednesday 6.30am IST) at Hoffstra University in Long Island, New York.
So intense is the preparation that the President, a golf aficionado, has had to forgo the temptation three pristine courses nearby has to offer and ignore a Ferrari convention that the 1% he frowns at are tootling up to. Instead, he is being put through the paces by tough tutors, including Senator John Kerry (the putative secretary of state who plays the role of Romney in debate preparations) and former White House aide Anita Dunn, who poses as CNN's Candy Crowley, the moderator of the second debate set for Tuesday night.
Few doubt that President Obama is in top of the subjects ; he was, after all, a college professor who aced Harvard before he went into teaching.
His problem appears to be of style — of appearing nonchalant and dispassionate; of cool reasoning and reasoned analysis. It is a style that wins good reviews in a classroom but apparently not in Presidential debate against an opponent who changes political and ideological colours like a chameleon. To pin him down and shake him out requires Obama to be verbally sharp and predatory, and that is what his advisors have promised this time.
"He has to be more energetic," Obama advisor Robert Gibbs conceded on CNN on Sunday night. "This time around, I think you'll see somebody who is very passionate about the choice that our country faces."
The President has to do this in a respectful manner in a townhouse format in which an audience of undecided voters will get to pose questions. He also has to make sure there is no overkill to compensate for his passivity last time because there is at least one precedent (George Bush Sr) of blowing it in such a format by appearing argumentative, contentious, and dismissive.
