I’ve long contended that Democrats who are smugly saying Barack Obama will finish off his likely challenger Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential election are being excessively smug. If they followed the primary debates, yes, Romney had some poor debates but he also showed as the campaign wore on that he had become a much better debater — crammed with facts, figures, zingers and ready to take it to his opponents and hold his own.
And the latest is: he has already started preparing for the debates.
Smug Dems and Team Obama kindly take note:
It’s 13 weeks away, but Mitt Romney has already begun quietly prepping for his high-stakes inaugural debate with Barack Obama.
Romney sources told the Daily News that during a three-day retreat he hosted late last month for big-time Republican contributors and party mandarins at Park City, Utah, the candidate also found time to squeeze in the first two rounds of what staffers call “debate prep.”
Romney convened six to eight campaign aides around a conference table at the elegant Chateaux at Silver Lake. They sorted through a variety of topics sure to come up in the three Presidential debates, like the state of the economy and the war in Afghanistan, and kicked around the best “test responses” to questions they expect Obama and debate moderators will toss at the ex-Massachusetts governor.
More such encounters are expected over the summer, but what one source called “podium practices” with an Obama surrogate won’t happen for awhile — mainly because Romney doesn’t care for them all that much.
“There will be some role-playing but not as much as other Presidential candidates,” a Romney adviser said. “The traditional model doesn’t fit his style.”
That style, insiders say, is what one calls “iterative” — absorbing copious amounts of information, assembling and parsing the facts, then debating the most persuasive lines of attack or defense with staffers and confidants.
So we now know that Romney is preparing for the debates.
Is Team Obama preparing for Obama facing a Romney who has been meticulously prepared for the debates and who’ll likely come armed with a host of zingers?
Stay tuned.
Literally.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.