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Mitt Romney will seek to overcome President Barack Obama’s longstanding advantage on foreign policy in the third and final presidential debate Monday night, in perhaps the last opportunity for either candidate to significantly change the trajectory of the 2012 race.
Romney enters the debate at Boca Raton-based Lynn University nearly three weeks into his best stretch of the general election. After routing Obama at the first debate in Denver three weeks ago, Romney has closed to a tie or better with the president in most national and swing-state polling.
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Still, Obama has retained some key advantages on the electoral map — his lead in Ohio, for example — and on the issues. While Romney has narrowed the gap on national security, polls show that voters still view Obama as the candidate they trust more on terrorism and to handle an international crisis.
In the second debate last week at New York’s Hofstra University, Obama was widely perceived as the victor in part because he got the better of Romney on an exchange about Libya.
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In a POLITICO/George Washington University Battleground Tracking Poll published on Monday, 51 percent of voters said Obama would handle foreign policy better than Romney. Forty-two percent favored Romney.
Both campaigns sought to frame the terms of the last debate in a flurry of press releases and videos on Monday morning. Obama spokespeople and surrogates aimed to set a high bar for Romney to clear, in terms of the specificity of his policies, in a memo from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry.
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“It is astonishing that Romney has run for president for six years and never once bothered to put forward a plan to end the war in Afghanistan, for example, or to formulate a policy to go after Al Qaeda. Romney, who once even said ‘a president is not a foreign policy expert,’ appears unprepared to be either,” wrote Kerry, who has helped Obama prepare for debating season by playing Romney in mock debates.
In what looked like a preview of Obama’s message tonight, the president’s campaign also released a TV commercial announcing that Obama had ended “a decade of war” in Iraq and Afghanistan and enabled the U.S. to “start rebuilding” domestically.
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Romney, meanwhile, delivered a pre-debate message that mirrored his bigger-picture campaign pitch: Obama has fallen short of the promise of his 2008 campaign, Romney spokespeople argued, and now presides over a world growing more unsafe.
