toasfrington pot October 22, 2012 Obama outpoints Romney in third debate By Eugene Robinson BOCA RATON, Fla. The "horses and bayonets" moment is probably the headline. But the larger story of the third and final presidential debate, ostensibly about foreign policy, is that Mitt Romney didn't really lay a glove on President Obama. For most of the evening, he didn't even try. Obama came ready to punch, Romney to counterpunch — or, since we're torturing the boxing metaphor, to clinch. He agreed with Obama's policy on Afghanistan, on Libya, on Syria, on the use of pilotless drones in the fight against al-Qaeda, pretty much on everything except how to improve the U.S. economy. Which wasn't even supposed to be a topic of discussion, but apparently nobody told the candidates. The president spent much of the evening recounting Romney's earlier, contradictory foreign-policy positions — his prior view, for example, that the United States shouldn't have pressed to oust Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi because that amounted to "mission creep." On that issue, as on many others, Romney simply did not acknowledge his flip-flops. It was as if he were at a dinner party and someone brought up a topic too vulgar for polite company. Obama had the best line of the evening, when Romney brought up his oft-repeated complaint that defense spending needs to be dramatically increased. The Navy is smaller now, Romney said, than it was in 1917. "Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets," Obama said. He went on to explain that perhaps we do not need as many conventional ships as nearly a century ago, since now we have aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered submarines and other modern weapons. Romney's one big flub was his assertion that Syria serves as Iran's "outlet to the sea," which will come as news to the many Iranians who live along the nation's thousand-mile Persian Gulf coastline. His pledge Page I 1 of 2 EFTA01113887