How did the president get caught off guard? By thinking it too late in the game for another shake of Mitt Romney's Etch-a-Sketch

MITT ROMNEY ran hard to the centre, and the president wasn't ready for it. Mr Romney deftly eluded many of Mr Obama's criticisms by disowning the position criticised, planting his flag to the left of Mr Obama's target, and then crisply elucidating his stance with a specious but persuasive specificity that Mr Obama seemed helpless to counter. Mr Obama's lackadaisical, presumably defensive stance badly backfired. Though entirely free of heat-of-the-moment blunders, Mr Obama's pathetic overall performance added up to one all-encompassing blunder, causing more embarrassment to his campaign than a few stumbles likely would have done. As Jonathan Chait of New York magazine put it:

Tonight’s debate saw the return of the Mitt Romney who ran for office in Massachusetts in 1994 and 2002. He was obsessive about portraying himself as a moderate, using every possible opening or ambiguity — and, when necessary, making them up — to shove his way to the center. Why he did not attempt to restore this pose earlier, I cannot say. Maybe he can only do it in debates. Or maybe conservatives had to reach a point of absolute desperation over his prospects before they would give him the ideological space. In any case, he dodged almost every point in the right wing canon in a way that seemed to catch Obama off guard.

But how did this happen? Was Mr Obama's camp lulled into complacency by Mr Romney's half decade of right-wing pantomime? Did John Kerry, Mr Obama's debate-prep stand-in for Mr Romney, pepper the president with Paul Ryan-esque talking points, leaving him unready for a slick Massachusetts centrist? Were they preparing for "zingers" instead of a confident torrent of detailed-sounding vagueness? Given Mr Obama's difficulty pinning Mr Romney down, this does not seem entirely implausible. However, given that Mr Romney's only plausible path to victory was always a dash toward the centre, one would think that the incumbent would have been ready for it.

The apparent fact that he wasn't ready, that he was caught off guard, suggests an answer to Mr Chait's question as to why Mr Romney "did not attempt to restore this [moderate] pose earlier". Mr Romney's move toward the centre constitutes yet another shake of the Etch A Sketch. Had he shaken it earlier, Mr Romney would have made himself more vulnerable than he was already to charges of flip-floppery. Maintaining a primary-ish conservative pose for as long as he did—through the conventions and all the way up to the first debate—may have signaled to Mr Obama's camp that Mr Romney saw himself as so vulnerable to anti-waffling attacks that he had deliberately foregone the risk and reward of tacking left. So Mr Obama did not prep for Massachusetts Mitt. Of course, Mr Romney has now opened himself up again to charges of sleazy, opportunistic positioning, of standing for nothing and everything. But not before chalking up an impressive debate win and making Mr Obama look a bit of a fool.

This is not a wad Mr Romney can shoot again. And Mr Obama is a tough customer who does not make the same mistake twice. I feel sure he will come back with a vengeance—with the Etch A Sketch, the 47%, and a sharper, more aggressive version of last night's cornered, almost whingeing plaints about Mr Romney's shiftiness.

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