WarSclerotic

The next presidential debate between President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney will take place at the ballot box. Having gone through three televised debates that captivated some 180 million viewers in the U.S. and millions more worldwide, there is no doubt that the best show in town will take place on Nov. 6. Actually, this will be the best show in the world. Elections are always interesting, especially when they involve the largest superpower in this very unstable and leaderless world.

This is in essence what the third foreign policy debate in Florida was all about: leadership. The U.S. electorate’s list of concerns has domestic issues and the economy at the top, much higher than foreign affairs. This has been all the more true in the 2012 elections. But U.S. voters, who are so proud of their flag and anthem, know that on election day they don’t just choose who gets to sit in the Oval Office and fly Air Force One but also who will be commander in chief. In the U.S., this title carries great significance.

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent countless hours with their advisers prepping for Monday’s debate, going over issues ranging from Egypt to China and from Tripoli (or rather, Benghazi) to Moscow. But what matters most was not the command of the details but the way the candidates projected leadership. Recent polls conducted among voters in Wisconsin, Virginia and Colorado — three swing states — show that less than 10 per cent consider foreign policy to be the most important issue of this election. Thus, at Monday night’s debate, the candidates’ most important task was to come across as natural commanders in chief. Just like their tuxedos had to fit on them, so did that title.

For that reason, the Florida debate was Romney’s big test. He came out of the Denver debate the big winner and momentum shifted his way. In that debate, he suddenly came across as presidential for the first time. Florida’s debate presented another hurdle he had to overcome. He had to show he was qualified to lead a superpower.

Throughout the campaign, Obama has had the upper hand over Romney when it came to foreign policy. Until the first debate, the president had a large 53% to 38% advantage on that front. By the time the two arrived in Boca Raton, Florida on Monday, Obama’s advantage on foreign policy had shrunk to four percentage points (47% to 43%). The Denver debate and the administration’s missteps in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi were among the factors that contributed to this erosion.

At the debate on Monday, Obama naturally wanted to focus on his accomplishments: ending the war in Iraq, setting a timetable for ending the combat mission in Afghanistan (currently set for the end of 2014), imposing crippling sanctions on Iran and, the most importantly, killing al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. Obama took pains to dispel the notion that he was soft on foreign policy or to feed into the Republicans’ narrative that he preferred to “lead from behind.”

Romney tried to explain how under Obama’s watch, the U.S. had become estranged from its allies (including Israel), how it failed miserably to “reset” relations with Russia and allowed Iran to get dangerously close to acquiring a nuclear bomb, not to mention that it presided over a general decline in American strength. On the whole Benghazi controversy, Romney probably wanted to be like former Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, who during the Watergate investigation posed the simple question, “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” (Romney has faulted the administration for not calling the Benghazi attack an act of terror in its immediate aftermath).

Given that Romney’s performance contained no major gaffes, like the one President Gerald Ford made in the 1976 debates when he said that there was “no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” journalists would be well advised to make hotel reservations in Boston come Nov. 6 rather than head to Chicago.