The debates are done: Three face-offs between Mitt Romney and President Obama, totaling 41 / 2 hours and combined transcripts of more than 50,000 words, longer than “The Great Gatsby.” But this was a novel with some glaring plot holes.
There were a startling range of issues that were never broached, a list that includes climate change, housing policy and appointments to the Federal Reserve. But one topic stands out for the mismatch between how much it has affected the economy — and how much of Obama’s time and energy it has claimed — relative to its nonexistence in the debates.
Europe’s financial woes have weighed on U.S. economic growth — driving down earnings among American companies that do business there and walloping financial markets on both sides of the Atlantic — amid persistent worries that the euro currency could unravel. It is impossible to know what the U.S. economy would have done over the past three years absent a fiscal crisis in Greece and other European countries (or if Germany and other financially stronger nations on the continent had responded to that crisis crisply and decisively). But it is easy to imagine that this was the difference between steady emergence from the nation’s deep doldrums and the muddling along that has occurred.
Read more: A missing topic in the debates: Obama’s handling of the European crisis - The Washington Post
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