# Horses and Bayonets During the October 22, 2012 US presidential debate, Barack Obama answered Mitt Romney's complaint that the Navy had fewer ships than in 1917 with the line, "Well, there are also fewer horses and bayonets." Within 30 minutes, the hashtag #horsesandbayonets was trending worldwide and the first parody Tumblrs were live. Horses and Bayonets became the most-tweeted debate moment of the night and the signature 2012-campaign meme in next-day coverage from Salon, The Atlantic Wire and the Wall Street Journal. ## Origin During the third US presidential debate on October 22, 2012 at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, Mitt Romney argued that the U.S. Navy had fewer ships than at any point since 1917 and that Obama's planned reductions would weaken American power[5]. Obama replied that the comparison missed the point of a modern force, saying, "Well, there are also fewer horses and bayonets," before describing aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines as examples of the capability that mattered[1]. Moderator Bob Schieffer let the exchange stand, and the quip hit Twitter within seconds. KYM notes that Romney's ship-count claim was itself a holdover attack from earlier in the campaign, which made the one-line answer feel rehearsed and primed to spread[6]. - **Platform:** US presidential debate (TV) / Twitter and Tumblr (viral spread) - **Creator:** Barack Obama (originator of the quote); meme format created anonymously by Twitter and Tumblr users - **Date:** 2012 ## Overview Anachronistic visual gags drove the format. Nineteenth-century cavalry charges got photoshopped into modern Navy operations, oil paintings of bayonet drills carried captions about Romney's defense plan, and horses were cropped on top of aircraft carriers[2]. Many posts paired the Obama quote with Romney's deflated reaction shots from the debate stage, or set the phrase over historical military art to twist the knife[3]. The joke's core is the mismatch: a ship-count argument gets answered by noting that pre-WWI inventories are not sensible units of military comparison. Tone on debate night stayed celebratory on the Democratic side and sarcastic elsewhere. Two single-topic Tumblrs, Horses Bayonets and Horses and Bayonets, collected user submissions of the best photoshops, while parody Twitter accounts spread fresh variations throughout the evening[2]. Image macros paired Romney's expression with 19th-century cavalry paintings, and other posts answered real policy tweets with horse-and-saber mockups[3]. ## How It Spread The Atlantic Wire reported that it took under nine minutes for a parody Tumblr to go live and under 30 minutes for the meme to settle into its photoshop format[2]. Twitter's election team later recorded the exchange as the most-tweeted moment of the debate, with a peak of 105,767 mentions per minute, and "horses and bayonets" overtook "Syria," "Mali" and "drones" as the top debate-related Google search term by the end of the night[6]. Former Democratic nominee John Kerry tweeted about the rebuttal at 9:45 p.m. ET, and the post earned more than 5,550 retweets before Kerry deleted it[6]. The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog chronicled early photoshops that same evening, including cavalry charges relabeled as the Romney Navy and bayonet drills marked "Mitt's fleet"[4]. On Tumblr, the archives Horses Bayonets and Horses and Bayonets launched within hours to curate submissions, and dozens of fan pages followed on Facebook[3]. By the morning of October 23, Salon, The Atlantic Wire, The Washington Post and the WSJ had all written up the line as the debate's cultural takeaway[5][3]. The parody account @HorsesBayonette, repurposed from the @RomneyBinders joke about Romney's October 16 "binders full of women" remark, gained more than 34,200 followers before midnight on October 22[6]. ## How to Use Posts typically pair the phrase "horses and bayonets" with an image that is either archaic (cavalry, redcoats, bayonet drills) or deliberately out of place (horses on aircraft carriers, musketeers on a modern battleship deck). Captions often sit on top of Romney's debate reaction shot. Some variations use the phrase as a tag for any argument that uses an outdated metric, with the image standing in for the object being measured. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Horses and Bayonets? It's a catchphrase from the October 22, 2012 US presidential debate, when Barack Obama used the line to answer Mitt Romney's complaint that the Navy had fewer ships than in 1917[1]. The quip sparked photoshops and parody Twitter accounts within minutes and became the most-tweeted moment of the debate[6]. ### Where did Horses and Bayonets come from? Obama said "Well, there are also fewer horses and bayonets" during the third presidential debate at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida[1]. The Atlantic Wire reported that the first parody Tumblr went live within nine minutes of the exchange[2]. ### What does Horses and Bayonets mean? In the debate, it was Obama's way of dismissing raw-count comparisons of military hardware, since pre-WWI inventories like horses and bayonets are not meaningful measures for a modern force[1]. As a meme, it tags any argument that uses an outdated or out-of-touch metric[3]. ### How do you use Horses and Bayonets? Posts typically pair the phrase with photoshopped images: cavalry charges on aircraft carriers, 19th-century bayonet paintings labeled as modern defense plans, or Romney's reaction shot from the debate stage[4]. Two Tumblr archives, Horses Bayonets and Horses and Bayonets, collected user submissions in that format during the first 24 hours[3]. ### Is Horses and Bayonets still popular? It peaked in the 48 hours after the October 22 debate and then faded with the news cycle, with WSJ and Washington Post retrospectives cataloging it as the standout debate meme of 2012[4][3]. The phrase is still cited as a 2012 campaign reference point in debate-moment roundups[6]. ## References 1. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZTNS54Vl1c]() 2. [http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/10/it-took-less-30-minutes-horses-and-bayonets-become-meme/58227/]() 3. [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/romney-saddled-with-horses-and-bayonets-meme/2012/10/23/7c340d3c-1d14-11e2-b647-bb1668e64058_blog.html]() 4. [https://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/10/22/horsesandbayonets-gallops-across-the-internet/]() 5. [https://www.salon.com/2012/10/23/the_debates_biggest_loser_memes/singleton/]() 6. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/horses-and-bayonets]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/horses-and-bayonets Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library