Dogfight by Calvin Trillin Page B

taxes,
        Then everyone’s life is enhanced.
    ----
    Joe Biden from the start had come out slugging.
    Though Ryan’s team said what came out was mugging.
    Joe’s smile, Dems said, would not have been so visible
    If things that Ryan said had been less risible.
    This tussle was, no matter how it went,
    Just warm-up for the next week’s main event.
    The Democrats, with fears he might lose twice,
    Bombarded B. Obama with advice.
    It turned out that they had no need to worry,
    Obama took command, and in a hurry.
    He didn’t seem the same guy as before.
    He won, said pollsters who were keeping score.
    Though neither toward the other was benign,
    Mitt seemed at times the one who crossed the line:
    Toward both the moderator and his foe
    He acted like a bossy CEO.
    And also, said the tweets and posts and e-mails,
    With his remarks he’d lost some ground with females.
    He said he’d asked (not true, as it transpired)
    For names of able women to be hired
    When he became the boss in Boston, Mass.—
    To crack the ceiling that they faced of glass.
    Thus “binders full of women” was a phrase
    That banged around the Internet for days.
    The ref was Candy Crowley for this brawl,
    The head butts and the gouges hers to call.
    Benghazi’s muddled tale, Mitt had a hunch,
    Was where he’d likely land a roundhouse punch.
    It seemed to be a weakness to exploit,
    But Mitt at trying that proved maladroit.
    ----
         Romney Attacks Obama on His First Response to the Benghazi Killings
        
(Or, We Never Promised You a Rose Garden)
        Mitt thought O’s response had not talked about terror.
        Of that he was certain, but he was in error.
        A warning was sent, but one Mitt failed to heed:
        Obama, politely, had said “Please, proceed.”
        ’Twas Crowley who told Mitt, and left him dejected—
        A pushy A-student by teacher corrected.
        He’d laid out a trap, and then
Snap!
The next minute
        The Mittster himself was the one who’d stepped in it.
    ----
    The Fox News types said everyone’s aware
    That Candy Crowley was, of course, unfair.
    In their religion one can seem quite pious
    By blaming everything on liberal bias.

32.
  
The Stretch
    Within a day, the pollsters would announce
    Obama’s win did not give him a bounce.
    So, at a rate that liberals found quite frightening,
    The margins in the swing states kept on tightening.
    The message that the pollsters now were sending:
    Obama led, but Romney was ascending.
    At last Mitt had the traction he had sought.
    His guys were energized, and they all thought
    That in the foreign policy debate
    Mitt Romney’s job was just to demonstrate
    He was a calm and level-headed guy
    Who valued peace, and wasn’t going to try
    To solve our foreign issues with more war—
    No matter what he’d said a month before.
    So, quickly, with astonishing velocity,
    He scrubbed away all signs of bellicosity.
    The policies he’d hastened to malign
    As weak and ineffective were now fine.
    ----
         Romney Beats His Swords into Plowshares
        Mitt seemed to agree with Obama a lot.
        Divergence in policy got hard to spot.
        He used all the moderate words he could muster.
        So where was the Mittster’s past neocon bluster?
        He knew that those still undecided would hate it.
        The answer then is that the Etch A Sketch ate it.
    ----
    Though he had lost, the Mittster didn’t trip
    In managing to execute this flip.
    He’d done, some theorized, what needed doing:
    Assured the folks that he’d not be pursuing
    Some aims that could bring war without cessation—
    The aims he’d backed to get the nomination.
    And so, with only two short weeks to go,
    Mitt had, he claimed incessantly, Big Mo.
    Reporters went along, though some then noted
    That states where some folks had already voted
    And battlegrounds that Mitt would surely need
    Still showed Obama with a narrow lead.
    Mitt did make progress with the