A viewer of the US presidential debate on Tuesday got an uncomfortable sense of how exhausting a White House campaign can be. Each candidate had the chance to take a rhetorical bludgeon to his rival, but lacked the energy or wit to do so. When Mitt Romney promised to help the middle class by cutting taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains, Barack Obama could have mocked him for peddling a plan for the rich. Instead, the president changed the subject. Mr Obama’s aides, meanwhile, have left a long trail of video evidence that they sought, for reasons still unclear, to misrepresent a terrorist attack that killed the US ambassador in Benghazi on September 11 as a protest that got out of hand. Mr Romney sputtered a bit about the attacks, but so incoherently that Mr Obama seemed to be the only person with the slightest idea what he was talking about. Willy-nilly, presidents must make most of their critical decisions in this frame of mind: exhausted and with too much information rattling around in their heads.
看了上周二美国总统大选辩论的人都会发觉，白宫的竞选真是让人筋疲力尽。两位候选人都有机会在言辞上给对手猛烈一击，但却都缺乏这样做的能量和智慧。当米特•罗姆尼(Mitt Romney)承诺通过降低利息税、股息税、资本利得税来帮助中产阶级时，巴拉克•奥巴马(Barack Obama)本可以嘲讽他兜售富人计划，但奥巴马并没有这么做，而是转移了话题。与此同时，奥巴马的助手留下了一段较长的视频证据，证明他们曾试图歪曲（原因尚不明确）一场恐怖主义袭击事件的性质——9月11日美国大使在班加西一场失去控制的反美抗议中遇害。罗姆尼对此次袭击表示谴责，但他前言不搭后语，以至于似乎只有奥巴马稍微听懂了他在说什么。不管愿意还是不愿意，总统必须在筋疲力尽、各种信息充斥大脑的思维状态下，做出大部分的关键抉择。