Thursday, October 4, 2012

The morning after debate #1

It's a strong consensus among pundits and undecided voters who were polled after the debate that Romney won pretty decisively -- and they mention his being more energetic, offering more specifics, and even appearing more empathetic to the people.

Nevermind that Romney did a good imitation of a hypomanic nerd, flailing around in order to confuse everybody listening -- clearly the chosen tactic to obscure the fact that his claims simply do not match with (a) reality or (b) mathematics or (c) what he has claimed to support before.

As Jonathan Cohn, writing for The New Republic said: 
"[I]f I knew nothing about the candidates and [if] this was my first exposure to the campaign, I’d think this Romney fellow has a detailed tax plan, wants to defend the middle class and poor, and will take care of people who can’t find health insurance."
Cohn continues, saying that the problem is that he has been following Romney's campaign, and he knows that none of those is true.
"He’s outlined a spending plan that would devastate the middle class and (particularly) the poor. And his health care plan would leave people with pre-existing conditions pretty much in the same perilous situation they were before the Affordable Care Act became law.

My standard for candor in politics is whether candidates have offered the voters an accurate portrait of what they’ve done and what they are proposing. Tonight, Romney did precisely the opposite. And that really ought to be the story everybody is writing, although I doubt it will be."
How true.

But, let's face it.  Obama was not very effective countering all this manic blather.  He was obviously thrown off by Romney's aggressive style and his changed story of what he stands for.  Typical of Mr. Etch-a-Sketch, he has shaken the box and reconfigured himself as though it's a whole new day and he's got a whole new program and approach to government.

Obama does not do well in debates when he gets angry.  (I wouldn't either.)   He needed a good bit more of Bill Clinton in him last night.    He will be better next time -- remember he was not very effective in the first debates in 2004 -- but the next one is 2 weeks away and only 3 weeks before the election.   Is that enough time to recover the slight loss in support he will get after this?

No doubt, it's going to be a close election.  We can still depend on Obama's electoral vote advantage.   I hope.

Ralph

4 comments:

  1. New York Magazine put it this way:

    "Romney won the debate in no small part because he adopted a strategy of simply lying about his policies."

    He lied about his tax policy; he lied about his plan to cover pre-existing conditions. His plan only applies to people who already have insurance and lose their job covered insurance. But federal law already provides for that.

    Obama tried to point out this fallacies, but he was not very effective.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I suspect that Obama is having a lot of . . . 'wish I'd said that' this morning. At a campaign rally in Denver he referred to "this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney . . . who does not want to be held accountable . . because he knows we don't want what he's selling."

    If he could have said things like that last night -- without sounding zingy or arrogant -- he might have been deemed the winner.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tomorrow's monthly jobs report will be significant: if it's good, it will help mitigate the less than stellar debate performance by Obama; if it is bad, it will add to any momentum Romney gets from his more aggressive (albeit based on lies and flip-flops) stance.

    So let's hope it's a stunning jump in employment

    ReplyDelete
  4. So Romney won on "style and performance," as though he and Obama were actors performing parts -- which in a very real way they were.

    But there were also candidates for the most powerful position in the world -- and surely substance must count for something.

    As Steve Benen wrote on Rachel Maddow's blog: "Winning a debate is surprisingly easy when a candidate decides that he can say anything and expect to get away with it."

    Obama's -- and Lehrer's -- failing was to let him get away with it. FactCheckers are now coming up with long lists of the misstated facts, although some of the early ones last night let him get away with a lot of stuff, like giving him a "mostly true" because something he said was what he had previously said, even if there was nothing to back it up either time.

    ReplyDelete