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Townhall
Rumbling
Toward a Knockout
by Suzanne Fields
Oct 26, 2012
Reporters
and pundits writing about
politics and particularly presidential debates can't resist the
metaphors of
the ring. And why should they? The metaphors work.
"The
incumbent fought with a
challenger's aggression, while the GOP nominee mostly avoided heated
disagreement, except to make jabs on the economy," reported the Hill,
the
Capitol Hill political daily. "But if Obama looked to lay Romney out on
the canvas and the Republican preferred a rope-a-dope strategy, neither
candidate was wholly successful."
Rope-a-dope
was the clever name
that Muhammad Ali, as clever with language as with the finer points of
the
sweet science, called his strategy in his famous "rumble in the
jungle" against George Foreman in Zaire in the 1974. (His press agent
actually coined the term.) The champ faked passivity on the ropes,
absorbing
repeated punches on his arms and body, until the hard-hitting Foreman,
finally
punching air in frustration, grew weary. Ali then struck swiftly, going
for a
knockout.
But
there was no knockout in the
final presidential debate. There was a lot of sparring in the clinches.
You
could see the president itching to draw his opponent into a slugfest,
but the
challenger played it safe, a thinking pugilist who expects to win by
remaining
cool.
Even
when the president descended
into condescension in their back-and-forth over the declining size of
the Navy,
Romney didn't retaliate. When the president tried an uppercut in answer
to
Romney's jab about the number of Navy ships, observing that America has
fewer
ships afloat than it did in 1916, the challenger stepped aside to let
the
president appear glib and merely slick with his own observation that
"we
also have fewer horses and bayonets."
Romney
didn't counterpunch, and the
next day the fact-checkers did it for him, reporting that the Army has
419,155
bayonets in its inventory, the Marines another 195,334 and has ordered
175,061
more this year, and horses, mules and even jackasses have been used in
remote
mountainous regions of Afghanistan.
Read
the rest of the article at Townhall
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