On this weekend’s broadcast of “The McLaughlin Group,” Pat Buchanan said that, despite all the back-and-forth during this year’s presidential campaign, history may well show the election was settled in the presidential debates.
Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?,” said the president has poorly handled both debates so far.
“If Mitt Romney wins this election, the debate performances of Barack Obama will be responsible for his victory,” Buchanan said. “In the first debate Barack Obama was listless. He looked like he didn’t even want to be president again. In the second debate, he depreciated his two most priceless assets — one is the dignity of the Oval Office, and the second is his likability. He came down out of that pulpit, that bully pulpit T.R. called it, and got into a big brawl with Mitt Romney. And I think he depreciated those assets.”
Buchanan said the debates have humanized Mitt Romney.
“On Romney’s part, John, the debates have served one critical function — the country has seen him, and it has come to believe that the caricature of him created by the effective ads by the Obama campaign all during the summer — that he was a super-rich guy, uncaring, you know, cheating on his taxes — is false,” he continued. “And so I’ll tell you, history will say ,if Mitt Romney wins this election, that he won it in the debates.”