The first presidential debate: 10/3/2012

Politics & Elections
601

I’m really glad to see that Romney’s favorables among republicans are up since the debate where he essentially promised to be a progressive.

Romney doesn’t want to raise taxes on the wealthy, and wants to help simplify the tax code. So does Obama!

Romney wants to get rid of some regulations and keep others. So does Obama! (Remember that thing about crying over spilled milk in his SOTU address)

Romney wants to guarantee healthcare to everyone, including those with pre-existing conditions. So does Obama!

Republicans are more rational and insightful than I thought!

602

I’m not so sure: I think TP’ers are slightly more rational when it comes to the economy than the Bush-era GOP. And this seems to be a return on Romney’s part to the Bush philosophy of spending as much as the Democrats but not paying for it.

Whereas the TP’ers realize on some level that you do have to pay for government. Their attempt to cause the government to fail by defaulting on the debt isn’t quite rational, but more rational than burying your head in the sand and pretending that the deficit doesn’t matter.

603

So true. Rodney’s performance was animated and energetic, but it wasn’t presidential. He was the only one on that podium who spouted stuff that has grown legs in a negative way. Which one of Obama’s sound bites have come back and bitten in the ass like this?

Sticking his foot in his mouth is Romney’s primary weakness right now. In trying to overcome his other weakness of being bland and milquetoast, he only increases his risk of saying more embarrassing things. He’s really in a catch 22, and its too late for him now to get this issue under control.

604

Finally got to watch the debate in its entirety yesterday, so here is my impression:

Yeah, Obama definitely underperformed in comparison to Romney, but I don’t think that he was absolutely crushed in the way that the media pundits seem to be suggesting. I guess that if I had to put a number on it, I’d say that the score would go along the lines of a 60% win for Romney as opposed to a 40% takeaway from Obama.

So essentially, the POTUS wasn’t demolished or anything, but he just came off as being too docile and unwilling to call Romney out on all of his attacks and lies. The post above talking about Gish Gallop is fascinating because it’s obvious that that was a tactic that Romney had been utilizing, and I really don’t know if there’s an effective way to counter that.

But that brings me to my other feeling about the debate: Romney won aesthetically but Obama won substantively.

I pay far more attention to this stuff than most of the people who watched the debate, but I was absolutely amazed by the fact that Romney spent the majority of his time either (a) lying about his positions or (b) creating entirely new ones. Seriously, when it comes to debating a notorious flip-flopper like Mittens, you have to give Obama a little leeway in that it must be very difficult to actually PREPARE to challenging somebody who stands for absolutely nothing and who will pull out new positions out of thin air.

So what that boils down to is that I think Obama hadn’t prepared himself to go against this new centrist Romney, and he was probably caught off guard. That said, because most of Mittens’s statements were lies or half-truths, Obama came out victorious when it came to detailing legitimate substantive facts or policies. He just lost when it came to rebutting Mittens’s bullshit or more aggressively going on the offense.

But the only thing that the media cares about is the theatrics of the entire thing, and so Romney comes out as the “winner” of this debate. I think that Obama made the deliberate choice to try to come off as being the adult in the room, which he did, but that just turned out to be the wrong decision.

Fortunately, given how competitive Obama has been reported to be, it’s likely that he is going to sharpen his sword and come out swinging in two weeks at the second debate. Also, if you want to take an Obama advantage out of this loss, it would be that expectations are going to be low for him going into debate number two, so as long as he doesn’t seem like a pushover and legitimately challenges Romney’s lies then the media will probably report that he won.

Lastly, the good jobs report likely blunted Romney’s post-debate afterglow because it robbed him of his central talking point. That’s a clear win for the President.

605

And on top of that, Romney inexplicably revived the 47% quote with his flip flop recanting of everything he said about it before. The man carries his own petards in his pockets.

606

More support for my theory that the man wants nothing more in the world than to lose this election*. He panicked a bit when he “won” the debate, and wants to make sure we don’t forget his most despised “gaffe”!

*I mean, sweet Jeebus, can you blame him? It’s got to be about the worst job in the universe, right under bathing syphilitic whores with gangrene and uncontrollable vomiting. If he loses this time, he can run again in four years when things have recovered a bit more and the job will be a nice kushy one with parties and pretty interns again.

607

This was probably a wise decision on his part. His debate performance was marked by him moving to a very blurry and ill-defined middle ground, and so it makes sense for him to capitulate to the outrage and apologize. The Obama campaign was still getting a ton of play from the comments, with ads that were from all appearances incredibly damaging, and Romney’s apology and disapproval of the comments have drastically reduced the effectiveness of those ads. It’s already October, so this debate was probably the last chance he’ll have to restart his campaign, but it was worth a shot.

The jobs report has put a serious damper on Romney’s attempt to control the public conversation, though, and it’s been hilarious to watch him and the Republicans scrabble for damage control.

608

A couple of thoughts:

  1. From the fact checkers I’ve seen, Obama and Romney both trotted out their bullshit lines that have been proven, at best, to be horribly misleading, and did so on an equal basis. Why all of the criticism in this thread about Romney “lies”?

  2. How did Romney tack to the center and abandon conservatives? I didn’t see any of it in this debate. If anything, he foolishly threw a bone to conservatives with his defunding of PBS comment.

As a Romney supporter, I’m trying to put it in perspective, but I don’t see how he could have done any better unless Obama had actually pissed his pants on stage.

609

And Rasmussen gives Romney a 2 point lead in the latest poll:

610

Romney wants to give his cake away and throw it away, too.

611

  1. If you read the FactCheck.org analysis, they both told untruths and half-truths, but Romney told a lot more. One of Obama’s is the $5 trillion tax cut thing, which may actually be true but nobody actually knows.

  2. What? No tax cuts for the “job creators”?

I agree that Romney couldn’t have done any better. The fact-check stuff only resonates with a small group of voters, virtually none of whom are undecided.

612

4 of 6 fact checking groups declared Mitt the winner for lying (misleading, stretching). 2 of 6 tied.

613

On a side note, why do we do 10 year projections? That’s outside of a Romney or an Obama administration, or beyond any President’s power. It’s never accurate. According to Clinton’s 10 year projection, the national debt would be gone!

Why not 20 or 100 years to make your or the opponent’s numbers seem silly?

e.g. Romney wants a $50 Trillion Tax Cut!; Obama’s deficits will leave us $100 Trillion in Debt!

614

Because tax cuts don’t work. For good or ill, we have built a consumer economy, and if the consumer has no money, we have no economy. If we have a functioning, robust economy we can pay our debts. Without it, we have enclaves of rich folks living in gated communities, and everybody else is offered rugged individualism and boot straps. But no boots, just the straps.

What’s better? Ten trillion in debt that you have a reasonable prospect of paying, or five trillion that you can’t?

615

The analysis is questionable on a few points, e.g.:

“In any event”?? If McCain had been elected and governed according to his stated views that withdrawl is weak and irresponsible and Not Listening To The Generals, what “event” would have wound down the wars? Would the Organians have shown up and neutralized the entire military-industrial complex?

Sorry, factless-check. It’s the President’s decision; he gets to take credit for the positive consequences (and blame for the negative ones).

616

The fact-checkers try to maintain the air of credibility by trying to do roughly tit-for-tat. If you actually read them though, you see that the things that they call Obama out on are often highly debatable at best.

For example, one of them at factcheck.org is Obama’s 5 million jobs number. They say that the official number is only 4.6 million because the preliminary revisions that put it up above 5 million won’t be officially finalized until next year.

Another one is Romney’s $5 trillion tax cut which I think Obama made clear in the debate: He told Romney, yes, you say that you are going to cut deductions and loopholes so that it doesn’t add to the deficit but you refuse to tell us any of those details and an analysis by a respected non-partisan tax policy center has shown that this is mathematically impossible.

By contrast, most of the stuff that they call out Romney on are basically just completely made-up “facts” on his part, not little quibbles about preliminary vs final figures.

617

Hmm; should post-debate polling discussion go here or in a new thread? It’s related, but kind of not, and there will be a lot of it coming soon. (Heck one could even start now, if one wanted, starting with the latest 538 post which indicates Romney actually won over some (assumably squishy) Obama voters at the debate. Beginning of the end for Obama, or is he just getting started?

618

No, one solid debate performance from Romney is not going to win him the election, not after he has been failing so miserably over the past several months. It’ll help his case, yes, but as long as Obama rebounds in the next debate his poor performance in the first one will be forgotten.

619

My last comment on the first debate:

Obama prepared for this [del]debacle[/del] debate here in Las Vegas (Henderson to be exact) in the three days leading up to the debate. On that Sunday before the debate, Obama arrived here and gave a speech to 11,000 supporters at a local high school soccer field. This speech was televised live, locally, and I watched it.

As he was giving that Sunday night speech, he seemed to be totally unfocussed and there were several times where it seemed he lost his train of thought. He quickly rebounded, obviously resorting to pat phrases he has given on stump speeches before, but there was something “off” his game.

I have taught speech classes in colleges for many years. If he had been a student of mine, I would have given him a “C” at best for that speech and told him to focus, stay with his audience and not be distracted. I would have told that student he looked unprepared and it showed.

I don’t pretend to know what is going through Obama’s mind at this stage of the election. I don’t know if he is distracted by other news that might not yet be public - perhaps more info about Iran or Israel or Korea or Kabul? Perhaps one of his kids is sick or having some kind of issue? Maybe it is a combination of things running through his mind at the same time.

All I can say is that this first debate was not so much won by Romney, but it was most certainly lost by Obama. Romney “won” by appearing relaxed and affable. Obama lost because he seemed distracted and almost annoyed by the process. The content was there - Romney ducked and evaded specifics, as usual - whereas Obama stuck to his script but delivered the material poorly.

I have no doubt that Obama knows he has to step up his game in the next two debates. Like all of my good students in speech class, sometime they have to learn the hard way that you can’t just coast your way through a speech (debate), no matter how well you know the information. Content is of course very important, but so is eye content, body language and overall presentation.

I will be eager to see the next debate to see if Obama got himself a better coach. He has all the elements of a great debater, now he just needs to practice, practice and practice more.

620

It’s all monkey. Jane Goodall could have watched the debate with the sound off, and told you who “won”. We are monkeys who like to pretend we are Vulcans, but we are still monkeys. We think the guy who is most assertive and confident wins, even when he is lying his ass off.

Obama is more Vulcan than monkey, more’s the pity in this context. He seems to truly believe that winning a debate means presenting the facts and showing the reasonable conclusion. But he’s not in a debate, he’s in a “debate”, “debate” is a euphemism for hooting, chest beating and baring fangs.

And so it goes. If you really love democracy, you marry her even though you know she is about half-crazy all the time and barking mad some of the time. Vulcan debates are calm and fact based, but we are monkeys. And we don’t play that.