Opinion

Why Romney romped

Mitt Romney’s spectacular debate performance Wednesday night was the result of a parlor trick only Republicans get to play — the same parlor trick Ronald Reagan used in 1980 to deliver the crushing debate blow to President Jimmy Carter.

After months and months of media portrayals painting him as a vicious plutocrat who tortured his own dog, cut a gay kid’s hair in 1965 and made a steelworker’s wife die of cancer, Romney stood before tens of millions of Americans and . . . wasn’t a monster.

Simple as that.

Reagan did the trick in 1980 with a shake of the head and a “there you go again.” Romney did it Wednesday by spending 90 minutes forthrightly asserting his policies would help Americans, especially middle-class Americans, while the policies of his rival had hurt them and would continue to hurt them.

Romney didn’t look or act like the caricature Obama has spent $300 million trying to burn into the American consciousness.

He was neither sinister nor condescending. He seemed neither comically out-of-touch nor secretly hostile to the interests of ordinary people. He didn’t sound like a man out to raise the taxes of the deserving middle class to benefit the undeserving rich, or one determined to separate America’s working people from their jobs and retirees from their benefits.

Rather, he came across like a well-prepared, confident, thoughtful leader with tons of plans at his fingertips, plans he’s eager to use to hoist the country out of the economic ditch. They came at the viewer so fast and in so many bullet points that it’d be surprising if one in a hundred could have recited them back afterward.

But Romney knew them so well that he parried every single instance in which the president sought to portray his policy ideas as cruel or mean or budget-busting or heartless.

Most important, and most telling, he didn’t seem like an ideological warrior, but a technocratic Mr. Fix-It. This is the case he’s been trying to make for himself for months, but he always faltered at it until Wednesday night.

Why did it finally work? Because Romney at last stopped worrying about whether voters liked Barack Obama so much that they’d be angry at him for being mean to his rival.

That peculiar notion made his criticisms ineffectual throughout the summer, including in his convention speech, and made it unclear to anyone listening why they should change horses.

So instead he simply talked about the president’s policies, and his own, and spoke with proper respect and with undeniable force. And he sought to engage the president not ideologically for the most part, but practically.

Romney is not by nature an ideological man, and so the lack of conservative fire and brimstone suits him. But he wasn’t disdaining conservatism; he was merely trying to make a case for his policies that would appeal to voters who are indifferent to ideology.

And here’s the thing — Reagan and George W. Bush, who were ideological to their marrow, did exactly what Romney did on Wednesday in their successful debates: They appealed to the center by muting the more aggressive aspects of their conservatism.

That was what “there you go again” was about — it came in response to a claim by Jimmy Carter that Reagan opposed the existence of Medicare. For his part, Bush invoked the ruinous eye rolls and sighs that sank Al Gore in 2000 by speaking about the compassion and heart that undergirded his policy proposals.

That is what a successful appeal to the political center is. Barack Obama made his career out of it — talking about bipartisanship and moderation while supporting and pushing undeniably liberal policies.

How did Obama allow Romney to get away with this? Again, simple: He and his campaign came to believe their own hype.

They grew so certain Romney was the goon of their fantasies, they didn’t count on how politically nimble and tactically clever he could be. They drew the caricature and thought it was the official portrait.

They won’t make the same mistake again, but the damage is already done. Romney isn’t the same candidate he was before the debate. He’s more substantial, more formidable — and far more of a threat.