Good thing he doesn’t have you as an advisor. He’d sound foolish playing semantic games like that.
Is no one going to address the idea that they mean what they say?
We have no quotes of what they actually say, only a paraphrase in the OP, in which he says “to turn the country or economy around”. A significant majority of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction. The ads probably address that, but without exact quotes, there is no way of saying for sure.
I disagree. I think the real meaning of “take our country back” is an appeal to those people who divide the country into two groups; real Americans (ie people like me) and “those other people”.
True, that is the target. The implicit message I get is to take us backward to those days when women, blacks, and gays all knew their places.
You mean Like this?
But him promising to do so without a clue how is a good reason not to vote for him. We know he promises to cut taxes on the rich and pay for it by closing loopholes in things to be defined later.
Anyhow austerity would turn the country around in the sense the OP is implying, so Romney may be totally honest.
No, “take our country back” means “put the WHITE back in the white house”. The opposition to mr. Moderate Obama have made it perfectly clear why they hate him so.
John, I was merely saying that this would give the president a chance to focus on the fact that, while not moving forward at the pace we would like, we are moving forward. Harping on this doesn’t seem worse to me than constantly taking sentences spoken out of context and using them as a gotcha. The right uses semantics and flat out distortions of fact as a bludgeon regularly. I just think this point would get some of the fence riders to listen a little bit harder to the ideas the people who want to run this country are putting forth and sometimes the simpler the better. I just don’t think it would hurt to remind the people what these people actually want to do with their power.
Consider the source of this statement.
Hey, anyone in the Obama White House reading this, you really should get a piece of the action on cutman74’s point! Can’t you hear Barack saying, “I don’t want to turn the recovery around and start shrinking! I want to speed the recovery up! I want to catch up! So when I hear Romney say he wants to turn the economy around, I gotta wonder: Turn it around to where? Another crash?”?
Agreed. Romney is wrong for the economy.
I’m arguing against the idea that him saying “turn the economy around” is him admitting he wants to ruin the economy. That’s just silly, but somehow people are running with it.
Why is that silly? He, his financial backers, and others of that ilk will end up better off. Before Obama turned the economy around, Romney and his ilk were growing increasingly wealthier, and even devaluation of their assets from Bush’s economic crash left the richest with a larger slices of the pie. He may be deceiving the fools who believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, but he might mean what he says.
Oh, you silly SDMB rascals. Always trying to say we hate blacks and women, always underestimating how much we hate liberals. Why don’t you understand that we don’t need any other reason to despise you?
Heh. Tell me another.
Man, you guys will do or say anything to maintain your delusions, won’t you? “turned the economy around”…I can think of 8.2% of the population that would vehemently disagree with that statement.
So 91.8 percent disagree with them then?
Your side has made it quite clear, repeatedly with the use of imagery that you despise him because he is a black man in the white house. I don’t need a cite for my claim because it’s self evident to non-racists.
Just out of curiosity, how high was that number in January 2009, when Obama took Office?
Okay, I admit I’m not asking out of curiosity. I’m asking because it directly contradicts the point you’re trying to make, and I want you to admit it.