Hu Jintao may be a bit conservative for Obama, true.
It’s the Daily Mail.
Even if that’s true, it’s like saying people are for government services except taxation. The latter is kind of mandatory if you want the former.
I keep waiting for Obama to wake up and realize that republicans do not play by the rules. You simply have to be naive to think Romney would show up to the debate and not do exactly what he has been doing since, well, pretty much his entire political career (lie his ass off and say whatever he thinks is popular at the moment).
I really think Obama’s strategy was to play to not lose. He figured he had a lead and could coast. Romney knew he was behind and had to play to win. The results of the two strategies were apparent.
(lie his ass off and say whatever he thinks is popular at the moment).
Which Obama should have pointed out, right then and there. Call them on it. More importantly, anticipate which lies they will tell, and be ready to nail them.
The straw that broke this camel’s back was after the Debt Ceiling/Bush Tax Cuts extension debacle last year. A partisan supercommittee was put together to come up with a fix, but the rules of selecting that supercommittee were designed to make their job impossible and their recommendations as impotent as farts in a hurricane. Then the “fiscal cliff” was carved out and the road laid right to it. Some SDMB posters were saying Obama was brilliant and the outcome was an example of how he outmaneuvered the House Republicans.
Erm, yea. How’s that working out?
Enjoy,
Steven
Well, yeah, except I’d of course go on to tease those apart. Are you for this legislation? No, I’m not. Do you want these services? Why, yes. Do you want these taxes? Er, no. Well, which do you want more: getting the services or avoiding these taxes? Shucks, I already said I’m not for the legislation.
I could imagine someone quite consistently giving those answers to those questions – and likewise if we swap “these taxes” for “this mandate”. It therefore makes perfect sense to me that a majority might not be in favor of the ACA despite being in favor of each provision except one.
I think you need both sides of the story.
The ACA isn’t what you think it is. Its all the spending with precious little of the cost savings.
Except the whole thing doesn’t really work without the mandate. Can’t have people waiting to buy insurance till they get sick/injured. Doesn’t work that way.
Also, interestingly, the individual mandate was originally a conservative idea. They were for it before they were against it.
Er, yes. That was, in fact, my point: fumster wrote that the ACA is unpopular even though people support each of its individual provisions; I replied that, as far as I know, people support each of its individual provisions except that one – and so, if “the whole thing doesn’t really work without the mandate,” then it makes perfect sense for the ACA to be unpopular.
So I’m not quite sure why you copy-and-pasted me to respond with an ‘except’; near as I can tell, a ‘because’ would have been a much better fit.
Is this the bit about how they hated Clinton’s proposal even more, and so floated the individual mandate as the lesser of two evils while preferring to do neither?
This is definitely true. I’ve been watching politics closely since the 70s and I honestly did not think a debate could possibly matter, and in truth after watching the debate I just considered it a push. (Obama’s presentation was off, but on the meat of the debate I thought it was a push.) I had forgotten how historically “presentation” is magnified immensely by pundits and then turned into defeats. By and large that is why Bush lost his debate to Clinton and Carter lost his debate to Reagan (and before my time–Nixon lost his debate to Kennedy in '60.)
Some people get really mad about this aspect of debates, but the only score that matters is what the polls say after the debate, everything else doesn’t matter, and I guess that is why issues other than policy tend to determine debate winners and losers.
I think Obama’s support is a mile wide and an inch deep, and the surge Romney got has nothing to do with Romney per se and everything to do with a country that has a lot of people disappointed in Obama’s presidency but who weren’t really attracted or willing to pull the trigger on Romney. The debate moved that a bit, and a slight shift with Obama’s weak support could indeed be decisive.
The problem the Romney campaign has had is Romney himself could probably win a Presidential election pretty easily against Obama given all the current realities, if not for the fact the GOP has scared off a lot of people in the past ten years. The extremes of the far right Christian fundamentalists, the gay bashing, the refusal to comprise whatsoever on tax rates for the ultra wealthy and etc have made the GOP a lot less functionally appealing to the “persuadable” voters than they were in 2000/2004 or any year prior to that.
I think Obama’s machine is still too strong and that first debate was Romney’s best chance to topple Obama’s relatively “weak” support (weak in the persuadables, obviously Obama has a strong base of people who will vote for him regardless of anything that happens in the campaign–a stronger base than Romney has of like voters and that also helps Obama from a structural perspective.) But the debate definitely took this from an election where I was expecting Obama to easily get 300+ EVs and a 1-2% lead in the popular vote to one where I think Obama might barely win the EC and and could even lose the popular vote.
Bolding mine
I think people keep forgetting this.
To repeat and paraphrase what Martin Hyde just said (but in a different way), Obama’s slight advantage right now has more to do with people’s reluctance to vote for Romney (and think of how much Hard fucking work the Republicans put into making Romney (or ANY Republican) as unelectable as possible).
People are ready to take a chance on almost ANYONE, not because they dislike Obama but because they feel like the economy still stinks. But the Republican have done an incredible job of making themselves unelectable.
I think Romney’s advantage during the debate largely came from the fact that he ran away from his own extreme record and positions and Obam LET HIM.
We have two more debates to go and I think Clinton should be his debate coach.
Obama was just slow to react and think on his feet during the debate (compare that to Biden “Oh, now you’re jack kennedy”, which came off as entirely unrehearsed (versus Ryan’s “With respect to that quote, I think the vice president well knows that sometimes the words don’t come out of your mouth the right way” which sounded very much rehearsed to me).
Obama doesn’t need to blow Romney out of the water but he does need to remind people who Romney is.
If I was running the Obama campaign I think I’d do something that goes against conventional wisdom you’re seeing in the press right now.
The President’s supporters are calling for him to go into the next debate engaged and out for blood, to come out swinging.
I don’t actually think that’s the way to do it.
To use boxing metaphors (because I like boxing metaphors) Obama and Romney are in the 11th round, and Obama is far head on points. Romney needs to knock Obama out to win the fight. In the first debate Romney landed a big body blow, nearly took Obama’s legs out from under him. But Obama is still standing. If Obama comes out swinging and aggressive at the next debate, he might knock Romney out or keep him at bay and win on points. However, coming out swinging means there is also a chance that Obama’s attacks get turned on him, that Romney effectively counters them, that the President somehow stumbles in his attack delivery and focuses negative attention on himself for acting “un-Presidential.” If that happens, it could seriously cost Obama the Presidency because of the deeply negative implications of losing two out of three debates in clear cut fashion. (I do not think a candidate has clearly lost two debates in any election in my lifetime, I don’t mean the normal push-debates where one guy slightly wins.)
No, I’d tell Obama to get through the town hall on neutral or slightly better. Don’t let Romney look any better, but don’t get nasty and take crazy risks.
Why? Because the third debate is on foreign policy. I think if Obama avoids a misstep in the second debate, the third debate is like a round 12 where all Obama has to do is move around a bit and kill clock until he’s declared the winner (winning the election, that is.) President Obama’s record on foreign policy is almost unimpeachable. He killed Osama bin Laden, he got us out of Iraq, he’s getting us out of Afghanistan, he toppled Qaddafi, he’s killed tons of high level terrorists with his drone program (unpopular amongst peacenik lefties but they aren’t swing voters.)
Foreign policy is also an area where Romney has no credibility, his foreign trips during the campaign he’s embarrassed himself, and he has no professional experience with foreign policy. At his convention he basically made vague mentions of saber rattling. The third debate is almost in the bag, but of course it’s also the least important debate, because despite foreign policy being the single policy area a President has the most free reign (and thus most impact) on, it’s the one voters care about the least.
If Obama loses the second debate, a strong third debate performance won’t really help, because it’s just a foreign policy debate. But if he draws the second debate, and the third debate is just him acting Presidential and talking about his undeniable foreign policy achievements, I think he’ll safely win the Presidency.
I guess the counterargument is maybe if Obama doesn’t “win” the second debate, it keeps noise in the press about the first debate. Maybe Obama feels like he has to win the second debate to reverse any momentum Romney has, that might be true, but I don’t believe it is so. I think Obama still wins but could gamble with losing if he gets too risky in the second debate.
I don’t think America will look kindly on an Obama that is content to sit on his lead. A lead that he has gotten virtually by default.
He certainly can’t let Romney continue to pose as a moderate despite sprinting to the right, right up until the morning of the first debate.
He can’t let Romney go unchallenged. I don’t care how big a lead you have you don’t take a knee in the third quarter to try and run out the clock.
It’s possible to challenge Romney forcefully without getting angry, without seeming mean. He should do it with a smile on his face. Look Romney in the eye, and tell him why he’s wrong. State his positon clearly, plainly, matter of factly. Check Romney every time he gets out of line. Cheerfully, with a bit of humor. Not ridicule or contempt, a la Biden. But unflustered good cheer.
Whatever he does, Obama’s got to drop the whole, “I don’t like debates and I shouldn’t have to explain myself to this Romney clown” attitude. He’s got to be able to look us in the eye, and explain what he’s done and what he will do, in clear, short sentences. (And complete sentences, why the hell can’t he complete a fucking sentence?!) Why should these issues matter to us? Why will he do a better job? Under the pressure of an audience, a hostile opponent, and a time clock.
I don’t care that he thinks he’s somehow above all this. Like TN Coates said, this is politics. This is part, a very important part, of Obama’s job. He’s not a fucking law professor or as Coates put it, a philospher king.
- (Bolding added by xenophon41.)*
See, this is why we can’t have nice things in this country.
I’ll explain. When a large part of the progressive base and most of even the best of our political punditry on the left (and I definitely count Ta-Nahesi Coates in the “best of the best”) can watch that debate in which our POTUS actually did effectively counter Romney’s points (read the transcript if you don’t remember that happening) and yet read into Obama’s muted demeanor the insanely counterintuitive proposition that PBO “thinks he’s somehow above all this,” unnhh! When that can happen, I begin to fear we’re too stupid as a polity to ever do more than luck into effective leadership in the Executive or Legislative branches.
Obama wanted to project calm consistency, steady resolve and trustworthy openness. He misfired on the energy level and the passionate underpinnings of his calm, consistent resolve didn’t come through.
But. That’s. It. He followed a specific plan, which was prepared with some care (as he always prepares) based not on the already convinced but on shoring his position among independents and undecideds. He wasn’t trying to persuade so much as reassure that audience that he understands the opposition’s political argument and rejects it for cause.
But any active partisan or even independent political literati who hasn’t been in a soundproof Faraday cage without access to media for the last five years should not need reassurance that President Obama understands and operates with gusto within the political process at all relevant levels, including public debates. If you’ve watched this man for at least the last four years and can believe, based apparently on one low-keyed debate performance, that he holds himself aloof from the process, well… I guess I stand amazed at the utter nullity of political and emotional acumen such an opinion reveals.
This was our first opportunity to see a side by side comparison of the two candidates. And Obama did not profit from the comparison.
Your point, DA? You quoted my entire post and responded to nothing directly. I have no idea what you’re trying to convey to me other than you probably agree with me that Obama was too subdued, but this much I’d painstakingly gleaned already from your previous comments.
ETA: [Homer Simpson]In case you couldn’t tell, “painstakingly” was sarcasm.[/HS]
His debate performance reinforces the notion that he is a passive president. “gusto” is not really the hallmark of his presidency.
I think there IS a perception that he is too aloof.
Well, I’ll give you the latter, as that’s not an adjective one generally uses to describe the enthusiasms of a process wonk. But Obama is undeniably enthusiastic and vigorous in his attentions to the political process. Anyone who had an existing impression of “passivity” to reinforce is either from one of the political extremes and has the excuse of chronic reality deprivation, has not been paying much attention, or is quite foolish.
I agree that there’s such a perception. I’m arguing that it has no basis outside of that debate performance and his general cautious manner of speech, and is not a perception a rational person should choose to retain as it conforms neither to Obama’s history of process involvement nor to his demeanor immediately before and after the debate. Occam demands another set of more probable reasons for the poor debate performance (such as general tiredness and poorly calculated moderation of voice and delivery).