Historian's Take: The Final Presidential Debate

Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2012 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved. Cross-posted from the National Review Online.

The final presidential debate focused disproportionately on the Middle East. Four of the six segments were on the Middle East, just two on other topics (one about the U.S. role in the world, the other about China). The European crisis got no mention, nor did India, Germany, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, or Australia. In contrast, Egypt was mentioned 11 times, Libya 12 times, Iraq 22 times, Pakistan 25 times, Syria 28 times, Afghanistan 30 times, Israel 34 times, and Iran 47 times.

Barack Obama has a weak record in the Middle East, but one would not learn this from the debate, where Mitt Romney praised Obama’s achievements (“It's wonderful that Libya seems to be making some progress”), agreed with Obama more than he disagreed, and rarely pointed out his failings. Presumably, Romney took this mild approach to establish his likeability, competence, and suitability to serve as commander-in-chief.

When asked about Egypt, Romney digressed to the need for a strong U.S. economy. When asked about American’s role in the world, he touted the achievements of fourth-graders in Massachusetts during his governorship. Perhaps his recurring emphasis on the economy will win over the elusive undecideds, but it left this viewer frustrated.

The Libya topic was Romney’s great surprise and his missed opportunity. Asked a softball question about the mistakes made in the aftermath of the attack on Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, he talked about better education, gender equality and other worthy goals -- but ignored the opportunity to establish that the Obama administration is not only inept but engaged in fabrications. Most agonizingly, Romney congratulated Obama for taking out Osama bin Laden without noting that this did limited good, for Al-Qaeda still had the ability to attack and kill Americans in Benghazi.

In terms of policy, Obama made statements about Iran worthy of note: “As long as I'm president of the United States Iran will not get a nuclear weapon. … A nuclear Iran is a threat to our national security, and it is a threat to Israel's national security. … We are going to take all options necessary to make sure [the Iranians] don't have a nuclear weapon.” Oddly, Romney replied with a detailed program of actions (such as indicting Ahmedinejad under the Genocide Convention) but did not make parallel statements of intent.

Like senators who vote leftwards for six years but then campaign as moderates during election season, Obama presented himself in this and the other debates as profoundly different from the president he has been. Someone not versed in his ideology and his record would not realize his distaste for a powerful United States (“I said if I got bin Laden in our sights I would take that shot”). He sounded like a nationalist, making punchy patriotic statements, speaking with a smooth eloquence, and showing himself at ease and in control. The question is, how many people will be fooled by this performance?

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K.C. Johnson is professor of history at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He is the author of numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign relations and politics, including "All the Way with LBJ: The 1964 Presidential Campaign" and "Congress and the Cold War."

For those interested in foreign affairs, the 2012 campaign has been a depressing one. The 2008 contest featured a robust conversation over the appropriate U.S. military role in the world (Afghanistan, Iraq); the need for a more aggressive pursuit of Osama bin Laden (recall the Obama-McCain debate exchange over Obama’s willingness to pursue bin Laden into Pakistan); the relative value of diplomacy; and even in-campaign crises (such as the Russo-Georgian military conflict).

In 2012, on the other hand, the far less significant, and frequent, discussions that have occurred too often have focused on peripheral items or -- regarding foreign economic policy toward China -- sheer demagoguery. The Obama campaign seemed to make a tactical decision to steer clear of foreign affairs except for the bin Laden raid, perhaps sensing that the public is more hawkish than the president’s policies reflect. The Romney campaign obsessively focused on the importance of words (“no apologies,” whether Obama described the Libya attack as terrorism, the wording of a U.S. embassy statement in Cairo) out of an apparent, and almost certainly incorrect, belief that more blustery rhetoric from Washington will enhance U.S. security.

For those who recognize the moral and strategic significance of the U.S.-Israeli alliance, the campaign has been particularly off-putting. Obama’s tone-deafness on Israel -- whether in the 2009 Cairo address, his testy personal ties with Netanyahu, or the administration’s reach-out to Peter Beinart -- has put the campaign on the defensive. Yet Romney’s eager politicization of the relationship (assisted, alas, by some Israeli conservatives) threatens to accelerate the already dangerous polarization of American attitudes toward Israel, with the potential for very real long-term damage if partisans come to see Israel as simply one more issue in the red-blue divide.

Into this discouraging context came the campaign’s sole debate on foreign policy. And ninety minutes later, there was little reason for a more optimistic view that the candidates would present an intelligent choice to voters.

Given Romney’s increasingly strong polling position -- with gains in national polling coupled with surges in key swing states to such an extent that, barring an unexpected change in momentum, he seems likely to become the next president -- the debate might have provided an opportunity for him to illustrate how U.S. foreign policy will change in a few months. Instead, he endorsed Obama’s Afghan policy and the administration’s use of drones, and beyond that seemed positively reluctant to discuss international affairs at all. Critical issues (most notably relations with key European allies) were ignored altogether. Even on Israel, Romney was surprisingly passive.

Meanwhile, no serious observer could take seriously the “differences” debated between the two candidates. Romney’s comments on China directly contradicted his own (admirable) commitment to a non-protectionist economic policy and any president’s (self-evident) desire to avoid a trade war with Beijing. Romney’s comparison of the number of ships in the Navy in 1917 and 2012 was appropriately ridiculed by Obama, and contradicted a basic premise of his campaign that tackling the deficit would be a top priority. And Romney’s detection of a linkage between Obama’s non-existent “apology tour” and Iranian policies is ignorant of history: if the words of a U.S. president influence Iran’s regime, why were there virtually no differences between Iran’s (threatening) foreign policy during the second Bush term and Iran’s (threatening) foreign policy during Obama’s term? As for the power of words: Romney’s claim that Ahmadinejad’s “words,” as opposed to his actions, “amount to genocide” would constitute a dangerous precedent indeed.

While Obama consistently defended his foreign policy record, he offered little to reverse the momentum Romney has enjoyed since the first debate. At the same time, however, there was nothing in the debate to give confidence about what sort of foreign policy Romney would pursue as president. Much of his rhetoric either seemed designed exclusively for political purposes (China, naval spending) or clashed dramatically (agreement with Obama policies) with the tone and substance of his campaign speeches. As the nominee of a party that produced, in George H.W. Bush, the most accomplished foreign policy president of the post-war era, Romney’s performance in this debate concluded a campaign that showed just how much the passage of two decades has changed—and for the worse—how leading Republican politicians approach international affairs.

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Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of numerous books, including Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin; Apocalypse Management: Eisenhower and the Discourse of National Insecurity; American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea; Dr. Strangegod: On the Symbolic Meaning of Nuclear Weapons.

Before the third debate began, I couldn’t stop thinking about Bill Clinton’s famous rule for politicians: “When times are uncertain, the American people would rather have a president who is wrong but strong than one who is right but weak.”

In the second debate, Obama had to prove that he could meet this test in terms of style. As I wrote then, he had to show that he had the personality of a father strong enough to protect the house from invaders. No one doubts that Obama passed the personality test.

Sitting down to watch the third debate, I was eager to see how the two candidates would follow the Clinton rule and show themselves to be strong fathers in terms of policy substance.

Of course Obama has been preparing for this test since he first became president. Many factors have shaped his foreign policy. But one factor, surely, was a firm determination to protect his right flank on national security issues, the perennial Democratic Achilles heel.

So there was little suspense about how Obama would prove his strength in this third debate. As he ticked off his accomplishments, he mixed military force against Al Qaeda and military aid to Israel with non-military forms of strength, such as sanctions against Iran and building up U.S. alliances around the world.

Romney’s performance was less predictable. By the end of the primary season, having pronounced himself “severely conservative,” he had filled his foreign policy advisory ranks with neoconservatives, whose favorite word so often seems to be “muscular.”

Given the need to prove himself the stronger candidate, I expected to hear Romney at least hint at that kind of “muscular” policy. I expected him to support military intervention somewhere, perhaps in Iran, Syria, or Libya.

But no. Even when he warned that “Mali has been taken over, the northern part of Mali, by al-Qaida-type individuals” -- fulfilling the Republican candidate’s traditional role of giving us someplace new to worry about -- Romney never hinted at a military response. On the contrary, he was just as eager as Obama to assure the American public that he has absolutely no intention of sending U.S. military forces into action, anywhere. Indeed Romney was more eager than Obama to convince us that he is the candidate of peace.

I can’t wait to see what the neocons, who thought he was their friend, have to say now.

Of course this doesn’t tell us anything about how a President Romney would govern. Yes, he has brought in a significant cadre of more “realist,” Bush-the-First style foreign policy advisors. But the neocons are still there in force, eager to capture Romney’s mind and policies. He’s leaving his options open.

His performance in the third debate does tell us something very important about the Romney camp’s political calculation, though: The American public wants a president who is firmly set against using military force. The Obama camp obviously agrees. At times, it seemed like the only real issue under debate was which candidate was more firmly committed to avoiding military force. This is apparently the expert consensus on the political mood of America in autumn, 2012.

Yet Romney still had the traditional Republican obligation to charge the Democrat with weakness. He did it by focusing on symbolic displays of strength. “It’s essential for a president to show strength,” Romney said, explaining why he wants more draconian sanctions on Iran. But he might well have used the same words to explain why he wants a major military buildup of U.S. forces, though he insists he has no intention of using that military.

Romney offered lots of other ways of showing strength, and only a few (like sending more arms to Syrian rebels) had anything to do with military force. There was lots of talk about economic strength, of course, both at home and in the trade competition with China. But he also talked about showing our strength by promoting democracy and women’s rights and education, and by shoring up our alliances.

Obama had a simple response to these calls for a greater show of strength: We’re already doing all these things. Indeed it was hard to find much real criticism in Romney’s supposed attack lines, except the claim that whatever Obama has done, Romney as president would do more of it. In effect, Romney claimed he would out-Democrat the Democrats when it comes to shows of strength.

“Show” is the key word here. We are still in the “theater state,” where the symbolism is the reality. And that is apparently the way the American people want it, at least for now. The public is always eager to keep the troops home after a war (or, in this case, two) that showed no palpable fruits of victory. Both campaigns obviously understand that.

However there is always a temptation to turn back to military force in a political culture like ours, so profoundly under the sway of the myth of homeland insecurity -- a myth that says invaders are always threatening to burst through the door and destroy us if our leaders don’t have fists strong enough to keep them out. Once the frustrating memories of fruitless wars have faded, there’s likely to be more talk of regaining national pride by using those fists. And in the White House there’s always a temptation to score political points by turning that talk into reality.

Here we come to the one crucial difference between the two candidates, which Obama was quick to point out in the debate. The public knows both how he will show symbolic strength and how he will use his military fists, because he’s been doing both for nearly four years.

Given Romney’s frequently shifting positions, we don’t have any assurance that the new Mitt who appeared in this third debate, the apostle of peace, would be the Mitt who would sit in the Oval Office. We don’t have any assurance that he would stick to symbolism and eschew the “muscular” foreign policy of his neocon advisors. If the public’s appetite for military action were to grow, it’s easy to imagine those neocons regaining the preeminent position they held in the last Republican administration. Then they might well persuade a President Romney to be strong, even if it meant a serious risk of being wrong.

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Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University, and the author, most recently, of The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, (OUP) and Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents: George Washington to Barack Obama . His other books include: Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady and Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. He is a member of the advisory board of HNN. His website is giltroy.com. His next book “Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight against Zionism as Racism” will be published this fall by Oxford University Press.

Could it be that despite all that tension and testosterone, that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney agree a whole lot more about foreign policy than they disagree? I learned from the debate that both candidates hope to stop Iran, contain China, support Israel, and magically conjure up a peaceful solution in Syria while seeing a flourishing democratic Arab spring. I also learned that both candidates would prefer to speak about domestic issues than foreign issues, as they repeatedly segued into their economic and education programs, claiming that achieving a “strong America” is a foreign policy issue too. These shifts reflected the American people’s mood -- this election is much more about domestic policy than foreign policy.

True, at heart Barack Obama is more an idealistic internationalist, preferring multilateralism and global cooperation, while Mitt Romney is a muscular isolationist, yearning for American autonomy and insisting on American strength. But these differences pale before the fact that it is difficult to assess any candidate’s foreign policy ideology -- let alone how that candidate will act as president. Predicting how a president will function in foreign affairs is as reliable as guessing how first-time parents will act when their children become teenagers -- lovely theories succumb to tumultuous unforeseen squalls.

Foreign policy is particularly elusive due to the unpredictability of foreign events, the mushiness in American foreign policy ideologies, and the often-constructive tradition of presidents abandoning their preconceptions once they actually start governing. Barack Obama himself is proof of the haziness here. To the extent that Senator Obama had a foreign policy vision in 2008 as a candidate -- when he had as little foreign policy experience as Governor Romney has in 2012 -- his presidency has frequently succeeded by forgetting it. As Obama boasts about getting Osama bin Laden and approving the Afghanistan surge, and as Guantanamo Bay remains open, pacifist leftists are understandably wondering what happened to their anti-war, human rights hero. If Obama is correct that the Republican candidate’s newly moderate domestic policies reflect “Romnesia”; pacifist leftists could mourn many such “Obaminations.”

Ultimately, the convergence offered a welcome reminder, as this campaign intensifies, that America’s greatest foreign policy victories, including winning World War II and the Cold War, were bipartisan moments uniting the nation not dividing parties. Whoever wins will have to lead from the center, in both foreign and domestic affairs -- moving from the theoretical clashes of the campaign trail to the necessary reconciliations of governance.

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Leo P. Ribuffo teaches history at George Washington University and is writing a book on the Carter presidency.

The end of this year's presidential and vice presidential debates prompts reflections on the series as a whole before examination of the last one, ostensibly on foreign policy. They could have been worse. In fact they have been much worse in the living memory.

Journalistic intrusion was kept to a minimum, sometimes by the moderators' self-restraint and sometimes by the candidates' feistiness. The major exception was Candy Crowley's accurate but intrusive endorsement of President Obama's recollection of his early statements about the attack on the U. S. consulate in Benghazi. There was nothing like the all-time journalistic low point of the debate era, Bernard Shaw's question to Michael Dukakis in 1988 about how Dukakis, an opponent of capital punishment, would react if his wife was raped and murdered.

Prodded by pundits to appear more human, Obama and Mitt Romney affirmed that they loved their respective families -- and vice versa -- but such references sounded formulaic rather than cloying. When invited by an audience member to discuss their personal values in detail, both candidates moved as quickly as possible to policy talk. Thanks be to Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, Ganesha, Joseph Smith, Robert Ingersoll, and the Great Chain of Being, no one asked Romney what he thinks about the Book of Mormon and no one asked why Obama accepts non-theists as good citizens. Even their invocations of God's blessing on America, a rhetorical standard since the Reagan era, fit into an ecumenical presidential tradition stretching back to FDR.

Thus Obama and Romney were able to battle it out with spun statistics, insults of varying effectiveness, body language, appeals to targeted constituencies, feints of amiable agreement, and the usual generic malarkey (to use a Joe Bidenism with a residual ethnic resonance). Either we assume that most voters can sort through all of this sufficiently to figure out the basic positions of the major party nominees -- in this case as far apart as any since Carter and Reagan in 1980 -- or we sink into the cynicism of H. L. Mencken's definition of democracy as the system in which the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. For 2016, let us fantasize for a while that the candidates will be brave enough to debate without moderators and questioners; agree to divide up large hunks of time in order to assert and rebut as they please; and leave the minimal preservation of order to time keepers borrowed from the NBA.

No president or presidential candidate can be expected to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth (which is why the latest fad of news media fact checking is so silly). This reality especially affects discussions of foreign policy, where words might have an impact on governments and peoples abroad as well as on swing voters in Ohio. No powerful country conducts foreign policy without large doses of bluff and ambiguity. Thus in the United States every major party nominee tries to blend a magical elixir of chauvinism, thoughtfulness, and prudence that will appeal to the electorate. There are exceptions to this rule, notably Barry Goldwater's principled defense of Cold War liberation in 1964 and George McGovern's principled plea to "come home America" in 1972. On the whole, however, the foreign policy elixirs served up by major party nominees differ about as much as Miller Lite and Bud Light. We therefore have a harder time than with domestic affairs guessing what they actually might do in office.

Governor Romney's elixir tonight was less chauvinistic than we might have inferred from his positions in the Republican debates and his party's assaults on Obama. For instance, he avoided the Benghazi issue. Perhaps he understands that total security is impossible, snafus are inevitable, and a much worse disaster occurred in 1983 during the watch of his party's secular saint, Ronald Reagan, when 241 marines were killed in Lebanon. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberg had persistently urged Reagan to withdraw the marines because they were "sitting on a bull's eye."

Tonight Romney proclaimed his support for peace, human rights, women's equality, and free trade everywhere. His strategy and tactics for achieving this hyper-Wilsonian utopia were inevitably vague. Fairly attentive debate watchers could see that Romney thought the American military too small, bashed China harder than Obama did, and favored stronger sanctions on Iran as well as an international trial of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He also urged greater American assistance to the Syrian rebels than they are currently receiving (as if anyone outside the administration actually knows what they are currently receiving). In the time-honored fashion of candidates challenging incumbent presidents Romney ultimately fell back on the promise of better "leadership."

Obama's sounded more chauvinistic than we might have expected if we had only read his book The Audacity of Hope and heard his speeches in 2008-2009 and didn't know that he is president. At one point he doubted that Romney had "different ideas." His own leadership had been just fine despite the Republican nominee's quibbling. Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi, men responsible for killing thousands of Americans, were now dead. China was coming around economically and could be contained with a modest military presence in Asia. In general the military was in excellent shape and the defense budget had increased steadily during his term. Above all, the United States remained, in Madeleine Albright's arrogant phrase borrowed by Obama, the "indispensable nation."

Whatever Romney's core beliefs about foreign policy, the Republicans are more hawkish and messianic than the Democrats. Pressure from the ranks would inevitably and perhaps decisively influence Romney's actions. On the other hand, a faction of congressional Democrats tries to pull Obama in a dovish direction. Moreover, since the departure of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Obama is the foremost proponent of restraint in his own foreign policy inner circle.

Yet restraint is a relative concept. The drone strikes into Pakistan and the overthrow of Gaddafi have more in common with the long tradition of American intervention than the President's liberal admirers like to admit. The term "humanitarian intervention" and the absence of disaster (so far) obscure the continuities. But for conservatives and many liberals the Vietnam War and the second Iraq War were also humanitarian interventions.

Speaking at the University of Washington in 1961, John F. Kennedy warned that the United States "cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind" and "there cannot be an American solution to every world problem." Romney and Obama should read Kennedy's speech not only for this message, but also as a reminder that that it is hard for presidents of a self-described indispensable nation to act according to their most prudent precepts.

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Bernard A. Weisberger is a distinguished teacher and author of American history. He has taught at several American universities, including the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester, where he served as chair of the history department.

I switched off the TV set after tonight's final words from Boca Raton with a sense of relief that I no longer needed to watch these dreary charades masquerading as genuine debates, mingled with a deep sadness. Insofar as the scoring of performances went, it is my judgment that Obama won.

But the American people as a whole -- all of us -- came out as losers.

This was the night in which foreign and world affairs were to be the prime topic. The ninety allotted minutes could have addressed the reality that American influence in the world is inexorably and inevitably declining from the years immediately following World War II, when a shattered Europe and a fractious post-colonial Asia and Africa begged for American support and American dollars and our only competitor, the USSR, was never as potent a competitor for hegemony as Cold Warriors painted. What today's public needed was an informed, thoughtful discussion of what this change means in economic, social and cultural and social terms, what our long-term goals should be and what policies can best achieve them.

What did we get instead? Utterly predictable questions from the veteran establishment journalist Bob Schieffer -- what to do about the Arab Spring, Libya, Syria, Israel, Afghanistan -- and utterly predictable and quite similar answers, though Obama and his partisans could reasonably argue that given Romney's many changes of opinion his many statements of accord tonight might not be the last word.

Essentially, however, both men offered the usual honky tonk and moonshine about American exceptionalism, and how the world is in dire need of American leadership. When Schieffer threw both men the fast-pitch question of: "What Is Our Role in the World?" both responded that we were the promoters of peace, human rights (and especially women's rights), political and individual liberty, and free enterprise . Nary a word about any American material interests. Nor a glance at the wide world outside the framework of these immediate flashpoints. What about the role that we played in creating the international banking crisis of 2007-08, and how we might cooperate in repairing the damage? What about the Americas and the possibility of our easing restrictions on trade with Cuba twenty-three years after the Cold War ended? How should we respond to the growing resistance to American influence in some leftward-leaning South American countries without the standard formula of funding right-wing death squads? How might we substitute informed friendship and mutual respect for the old pattern of control from Washington?

Needless to say not a syllable was uttered about cooperation in dealing with global warming, nor did a hint escape of modifying our resistance to joining international treaties against land mines or child soldiers for fear of hindering American military forces. And there was no suggestion of modifying our demands on other sovereign nations for exempting U.S. soldiers on their turf from answering to their laws, exactly the kind of "extraterritoriality" that Western nations had imposed on their imperial subjects.

Instead, there were only expressions of the absolute necessity for American greatness and leadership without a single reason being offered as to why we could not have a multi-polar world, or leadership by consortium of democratically-inclined nations. No recognition that other nations might not respond enthusiastically to our swagger -- in particular, Muslim nations that also have their pride and unwillingness to have Americans teach them how to become more "civilized." All I heard from both candidates was more of how we must remain the city on the hill, the light and example of the world, twisting the words of men like John Winthrop and Tom Paine into grotesque shapes that those two would not have recognized.

As always, both men indulged in what were, if not outright lies, at least deceptive innuendoes. Twice Obama praised himself and his administration for getting our troops out of Iraq at the end of 2011, which he did -- but that timetable was set by a Status of Forces agreement between Washington and Baghdad concluded in 2008 under the second President Bush. On Romney's side, he once more alluded to his great success as governor of Massachusetts in working with Democrats in its legislature to craft his health care plan in contrast to Obama's style. I wished desperately for an immediate fact-check on the claim, but I was astonished to see Obama letting Romney escape without a reminder that his every attempt to extend a hand "across the aisle" had seen it batted away by diehard Republicans.

Both debaters paraded their faith in the necessity for a strengthened military -- farewell to the idea of "sequestration" of military funds -- and Obama got off the zinger of the evening when Romney complained that the current navy had fewer ships than in 1917 and the president responded that we now had an army with fewer horses and bayonets . Modern instruments of war pack far more destructive power into fewer and more mobile weapons.

The debate wore on with less and less daylight showing between the two. Romney tried to show himself the greater friend of Israel, but Obama made it clear that we would have Israel's back under any foreseeable circumstances. It was a good night for Benjamin Netanyahu. Romney gave one hundred percent support to the drone attacks, to the 2014 withdrawal date from Afghanistan, to pushing Pakistan towards a "civil society" -- but not too vigorously. Both candidates, when it was possible, tried hard to revert to their standard and more antagonistic positions on domestic affairs, showcasing their clashing plans for restoring the economy, creating jobs, becoming energy independent, and reforming the educational system. Neither one adverted to the social issues like gay rights and abortion on which the Democrats had undeniably a more liberal slant.

But in the closing statements it was back to dancing the jig of ultranationalism for the attraction of listeners ready to abandon thinking in favor of cheering the flag. Obama ended with a promise to "fight for your families and keep us the greatest nation in the world," and Romney begged the voters to make him the leader who he could raise the torch of freedom and maintain America as "the hope of the earth."

I could not help being reminded that only the day before this exhibition of this sanctioned political hoochy-kootch dancing, George McGovern had died -- a man who had not hesitated to fight for ending the Vietnam War, heedless of attacks on his patriotism and courage (despite the fact that he was a decorated World War II bomber pilot) -- and paid a political price as the most thoroughly defeated candidate in modern electoral history. As an historian I was reminded too of other courageous politicians, Republican and Democratic, who had taken up the cudgels against the militarism and jingoism which are now infecting our national dialogue. I thought of Robert LaFollette and five other senators who voted against our entry into World War I -- of Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening who alone rejected the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, of Russ Feingold and more than a dozen other senators who voted "No" on the open-ended resolution that gave George W. Bush authorization to use all necessary measures to protect us from Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. And that display of courage was ten years ago. It helped cost Feingold his seat in 2010 -- and did not avoid the war. How far we have fallen!

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Jim Sleeper lectures in political science at Yale and posts frequently at TPM. He has been a New York newspaper columnist and is the author of The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism. His website is www.jimsleeper.com.

Barack Obama's performance in the first debate was disastrous, I claimed, because "what he has seen of America since 2009 has broken his heart."

His performance in the final presidential debate was superb for exactly that same reason.

What's different now is that, sometime before the third debate, this man faced and centered himself in the tragic optimism, borne of a broken heart, that is every American's lot and is every great president's even more so.

No president since Lincoln has been able to show this fully to the public without losing his presidency, and Obama seemed to be losing his own by showing it during the first debate. But last night he did what he had to do to communicate and to lead the country around Mitt Romney, most pundits and political consultants, and even those voters, including his own supporters, who haven't faced the tragic truth enough to rise above it rather than run from it.

For those who had eyes to see, Obama's existential command of this challenge was even more impressive than his command of a foreign-policy realism deeper than that of Romney's neo-conservative advisers and donors.

Mitt Romney did see this, I think, in the way any ragingly surreal, typically American fraud occasionally senses his own emptiness before someone wise and strong enough to be shouldering the burden of tragic optimism.

And what is that burden? The philosopher George Santayana characterized the American as "an idealist working on matter," successful in invention, conservative in reform, and quick in emergencies. "There is an enthusiasm in his sympathetic handling of material forces which goes far to cancel the illiberal character it might otherwise assume."

But not far enough, and that's the tragedy that Romney carries so lightly, at disastrous cost to society, as Benjamin Wallace-Wells' remarkably understanding, almost empathetic, portrait of "The Romney Economy" makes clear. Romney's Mormonism takes this very American way of spiritualizing of the material and materializing of the spiritual to surreal lengths, as Chris Lehmann showed memorably in Harpers.

By contrast, although I hate to remind everyone of it, Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright cried "God damn America!" in the voice of an older, darker, equally American way of juggling the material and the spiritual -- the Puritan way of John Winthrop, from whose congregational churches Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ is descended, and who warned that if Americans succumbed to "carnal lures" they would turn their city upon a hill into a mockery among the nations:

"If we deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a byword through the world, wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the wayes of god and all professours for Gods sake; wee shall shame the faces of many of gods worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into Cursses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land whether wee are going,"

The exuberant subversion of this warning is not only Mormonism's doing. It's Ayn Rand's fault, too. And it's the fault of American jurisprudence that, as I showed here after the first debate, miscasts algorithmically driven, civically mindless business corporations as "persons" whose "speech" the First Amendment was supposedly crafted to protect.

Romney and Ayn Rand's apostle Paul Ryan throw into high relief what this country has become, what Winthrop warned us against becoming. Obama understands this more deeply than almost anyone, and his performance in the first debate was a casualty of his disinclination to suffer fools who propose to tackle this society's problems with refreshed ignorance of the truth that a country is not a company.

But Obama cannot say "God damn America!" He cannot be frank about how far off the cliff our legislative and jurisprudential construction of business corporations has taken us. He has to sustain an optimism that is aware of its own tragedy but rises above it. In the third debate, he did it.

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Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle, is a Professor Emerita of History at U.C. Davis and a scholar in residence at the Center for the Study of Right-Wing Movement at U.C. Berkeley. Her most recent book was “The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America.”

Presidential candidates usually frame national security in terms of foreign policy -- relations between nations, including their treaties, military agreements, arms sales, foreign aid and military action. But if a president’s most important job is to protect the welfare of his nation’s citizens, then this foreign policy frame is actually a narrow, militaristic, euphemistic way of avoiding talking about our real need for national security.

The greatest threats to our nation and our people are the growing wealth inequity that stifles economic growth and pushes millions into poverty; our dependence on energy sources that ignite wars and pollute the planet; our lack of universal health care; and a failure to provide educational opportunity for millions of children stuck in low-performing schools.

In short, national security is about protecting our nation by investing in human capital and providing for the health and education of our citizens.

Last night, the presidential candidates were asked and answered the expected questions about our military and diplomatic policy toward Israel, the entire Middle East region, the nuclear capabilities of Iran, our growing partnership -- and adversarial relationship -- with China, defeating terrorists, and who would be the most decisive and thoughtful Commander-in Chief.

Nearly absent from this debate were the horrifying consequences of a narrow and militarized definition of national security. “Collateral damage,” a term bandied about among defense analysts, is just another way of saying that drones, which both candidates supported, have killed women and children and destroyed families, clans and villages thousands of miles from home.

And then the collateral damage follows our soldiers home. More of them commit suicide than are killed in combat. They are plagued by memories that turn them into alcoholics and addicts. With brain traumas rampant, spouses no longer have a healthy husband or wife, and their children no longer have a functional parent. Two million children of recent veterans have suffered from elevated levels of depression and learning problems.  This collateral damage not only harms those who fight our resource wars, but also scars the women and men who must care for the injured and the children whose lives have been irreversibly transformed.

And yet, during this entire debate on foreign policy we heard relatively little about the impact of our militarized foreign policy on people’s lives. 

Nor did any candidate expose the many lies that led us to invade Iraq, which have caused so many of these family traumas.  Barack Obama has boasted that his administration killed Osama bin Laden, finally extricated us from Iraq, and has convincingly expressed his concern for military families. Neither candidate, however, conceded that George W. Bush lied to the American people about Iraq, a prolonged war that has caused the ripples of pain and trauma that will go on for decades. 

Mitt Romney tried hard to prove he’s rougher and tougher than Obama, who dared to use the “soft” word of “diplomacy” at the United Nations and would talk with Iran, before bombing it. But in fact, he gradually softened his stance and mostly agreed with all the president’s policies. He truly didn’t want tomorrow’s papers to portray him as a Republican war mongerer. Much clearer was his goal to protect the wealthiest players in the global economy, as well as the so-called “job creators” in the United States, from paying too much taxes. 

What would a real national security look like? This debate never really took place.  For starters, we would protect human rights and civil liberties, here and abroad. We would not have warrantless electronic surveillance. Nor would we allow the National Defense Authorization Act that permits the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects -- even American citizens -- without trial. This is a violation of our constitution and an assault on democracy. The gradual evisceration of our civil liberties makes America less safe, not more secure. In the name of a military national security, we have given up some of our most precious rights and liberties.

Real national security means education for our children; jobs, homes and healthcare for all our citizens; protecting the health of the planet and leaving a democratic society for our grandchildren.

To his credit, the president repeatedly talked about “nation building” at home, instead of intervening in other countries’ political affairs. He praised negotiations and sanctions that had avoided wars, and stressed the urgent need to build the America’s economy. If we want to lead, he said, we need to set an example. We stood up for the democratic movements in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt and demonstrated that we believe in democratic principles. He also reminded viewers -- repeatedly -- that under his administration, American foreign policy views the education of women as the path to peace and prosperity. Without women’s rights, he emphasized, economic development was impossible in developing nations. (Everyone has finally figured out that women’s votes will decide the election.)

Obama described America’s need for “nation building” in terms of retraining workers, elevating educational standards, and improving math and science so that American students can build 21st century energy sources and advanced manufacturing.  One of his foreign policy goals was that of creating a model of democracy and decency for the rest of the world. To lead, he said, we must set an example.

And does the rest of the world agree with Obama that we have improved America's credibility in the world?

Yes and no.

When the United States supported Libya, some people may have felt that the United States is finished with paying dictators for their resources.

But when a crackpot made a video vilifying the Islamic religion, the immediate fiery explosion of anti-Americanism tells us something that was never debated tonight. America is admired for many of its ideals and innovations, but it takes just one ugly insult for tens of thousands of people to express their true feelings about America’s attempt to control their resources and dominate their region.

In short, our foreign policy has failed miserably. Obama’s idea of “nation building” within the United States is far more promising that the usual discussion of military policy. National security should be about strengthening our democracy and creating an example that billions of people around the world would like to emulate. Obama genuinely seemed to understand that.