Trying to salvage something useful from last night’s dreary debate, a few commentators have claimed that it was at least substantive, that it dealt with the real issues the country faces. But substance means grappling with the truth and its many interpretations, not merely sounding wonky by repeating the words Dodd and Frank. Truthful arguments were missing on the Denver stage.

You could have a substantive argument on whether tax cuts for the rich stimulate the economy and benefit the middle class and the poor. But Mitt Romney didn’t want that argument; instead he simply walked past the facts and denied that he was even proposing a $5 trillion tax cut. That’s not substance; it’s thin air.



You could have a substantive argument on whether the government should play a role in providing health insurance to the uninsured, requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions. If Mr. Romney really feels so strongly that “Obamacare is a mistake,” as he said, he could explain why that’s not government’s role and why the chronically ill should rely on the private market. Instead he said he has a plan to cover pre-existing conditions. There is no such plan, and thus no real substance.

A debate isn’t serious simply because it ostensibly deals with complicated subjects. A real discussion of education policy, for example, would grapple with whether Mr. Obama’s investment in Race to the Top is working, and whether those dollars should be cut. It does not consist of a line like this from Mr. Romney, one of his most egregious in the debate:

“I’m not going to cut education funding. I don’t have any plan to cut education funding and grants that go to people going to college. I’m planning on continuing to grow, so I’m not planning on making changes there.”

This was a head-slapping moment from the man who told donors in Florida that he would do exactly that, either merging the Education Department into another agency “or perhaps make it a heck of a lot smaller.” When he was trying to persuade Republicans to make him their nominee, he loudly endorsed the Paul Ryan budgets in the House that would have forced drastic cuts to education spending, including dropping 200,000 children from Head Start. And he has made it clear he would reduce the number of students eligible for Pell grants for college.

A substantive debate would also have required Mr. Obama to interrupt a lie like this one and ridicule it with the facts. But time after time, the president passed up opportunities to do exactly that, leaving uninformed viewers with the impression that Mr. Romney was crisper and had more “facts” at his fingertips.

The president’s failure to engage was, in miniature, the same one that has allowed Republicans to misrepresent the stimulus, and health care reform, and the sequester, and get away with it. For four years, Mr. Obama has been an ineffective salesman of his own hard work and vision, and he was an even worse salesman last night, when it counted. He seems to view the work of making a sale as beneath him – an advertiser’s grubby task – but that is the essence of politics, and Republicans are quite good at it.

It’s time the president joined the game, and not just to win re-election. If he does return to the White House, he will need all of his persuasive powers to make his second term more successful than his first. For the moment, he seems to have misplaced them.