Romney Alienates Half the Country in One Go

[Mytical]

Yeah..Mitt is a bit out of touch with such 'trivial' (to him) things. He probably has people who buy food/etc for him. Wish that was my only problem with Mitt though. He has done everything to lose this election short of punching a child in the nose, yet I can not help but think he might just might pull it off. Then I probably will be just SoL..since I am on disability and he will probably rip that to shreds. Yeah I am one of the 47% that he doesn't care about.

Haven't seen the debate yet, wonder how it went.

[Skunkle]

I haven't seen all of it. But apparently, Obama didn't do so hot - not a lot of facts, periods of looking down at the podium, and not calling Romney on lies told during the debate or on comments like the 47%. I'm not sure what happened, but rumor claims Obama tossed few if any barbs at Romney, but got quite a few thrown at him.

Hopefully he'll perk up by a large amount in the next one.

[Andara Bledin]

From what I gather, it wasn't pretty for Obama. We'll see how the polls react.

Hopefully, it'll be a good indication for him to get his game face on before the next one.

^-.-^

[BrenDAnn]

I dunno...from my (admittedly very biased) point of view, what i saw last night was this:

"I have a plan!"
"Give us details, Mitt."
"I just...I have a plan!" *rambles on, talking over moderator*
*moderator loses complete control of debate and may as well have gone home*
"For the last 18 months you've said this and now you're saying that..."
"I never said that!" *two minutes later* "...And my tax cuts favor the top percent of households..."
blah blah ad nauseum...yes, Obama was looking at the podium, but I thought he was making notes. Mitt skirted around every answer, never gave details of his big "plan", from what I recall. Like I said, I'm biased but...I wouldn't call it a great amazing tromp over Obama by any means. Also, I still think we can all kiss our asses goodbye if Romney is elected. Just saying.

ETA: My favorite Obama line had to be "...And now his big, bold plan is 'nevermind'?"

[Jaden]

I watched the whole thing with a couple of friends. My take on it was that Obama came off as being a bit, umm...the word people keep using is listless, but I don't think that's quite it. It was sort of like he just thought that the debate wasn't worth his time. Unfortunately, it came across quite obviously in his performance, whereas Romney was surprisingly on his game as far as coming across as a real human being. It was the first time I ever saw him where it felt like he actually cared about what he was talking about and wasn't just a Republican robot.

However, that being said, Obama on a mediocre night and Romney at his best still aren't that different. Obama had his facts much more straight, and while he never directly called Romney a liar, there were certainly a couple of things. My friends and I looked up the statistics and did the math, and Obama was absolutely right about Romney's tax cuts adding up to about $5 trillion ($4.8 trillion by our count). Of course, Romney's argument against that is that he's going to close loopholes and deductions to make up for that money - how and which ones he didn't specify, so that's dubious at best.

Also, the figure about medicare that Romney kept bringing up - 716 billion or whatever iti s, I don't feel like looking it up - has been debunked so many times it's impossible to take seriously.

And finally, Romney's solution to Obamacare was to repeal it and let the states put in their own legislature, saying he felt his model for Massachusetts was great on a state level and not on a federal level. That's great and all, but where's the guarantee that the states won't fuck people and will put in healthcare laws as good as the Massachusetts or Obamacare ones?

So, Romney did prove something important last night - he proved that he's a human being with actual emotions and not an android. He also did a good job going on the offensive and handled himself well. Good for him, but Obama still won in the substance department, I think. People are saying Romney won the debate last night, and that's probably true, in so much as people's expectations were so low for Romney and so high for Obama, but this is the first test he passed, and he's failed so many more before this I hope it doesn't make a big difference in the polls.

That being said, domestic and economic policy is definitely the area where Romney was most prepared. I have little doubt Obama will just crush him in the foreign policy debate.

And that's my take on the debate in general.

[AdminAssistant]

Jim Lehrer lost control of the debate pretty much immediately. That said, I thought it was completely inappropriate for Romney to tell Lehrer that he wanted to slash government funding of PBS.

I want a candidate, and I don't care which one at this point, to address military spending. It's the giant pink elephant in the room in terms of our budget, but nobody wants to talk about it.

[Greenday]

I want a candidate, and I don't care which one at this point, to address military spending. It's the giant pink elephant in the room in terms of our budget, but nobody wants to talk about it.

Obama actually brought military spending up. Although it had nothing to do with how he would like to do with military spending, he pointed out that Romney wants to up military spending...despite the fact that the military hasn't requested any such thing.

[Mytical]

Yeah, I seem to have seen a different debate then most. Obama was not 'on top of his game' by any means, but I think he stuck to the points. If that is good or bad..no idea. Mitt seemed to skirt the questions, giving mostly double speak. However, he did a much better job then I expected. Mostly because he looked human. Must have had an upgrade (that's a joke folks). While I think comparatively speaking Mitt did an overall better job, it just doesn't seem to be the slaughter people have been hinting at.

[BrenDAnn]

Actually, I thought Mitt looked confused a great deal of the time. Oh, and someone on my Twitter feed suggested making a drinking game out of him making numbered lists...which, of course, would have worked, except Obama started numbering later on. Oh, and Romney's comments apparently spurred a long letter from PBS expressing their disappointment. Leave Big Bird alone, Mittens!

[HYHYBT]

I want a candidate, and I don't care which one at this point, to address military spending. It's the giant pink elephant in the room in terms of our budget, but nobody wants to talk about it.

Romney's your man, then. He did talk about military spending: he essentially said it must never be cut for any reason.

Maybe it's the game show fan in me, but for the 2016 debates, I want twin isolation booths and on-screen countdown clocks, with each candidate's microphone and lighting shut off when the clock hits 0. They can go back and forth as long as the moderator thinks it would be constructive to do so, but no more than the allotted time per round.

And the moderator should be Jon Stewart.

[Greenday]

And the moderator should be Jon Stewart.

I disagree. I think Jon Stewart should be in one of those booths.

[Gravekeeper]

I think Obama's problem last night was that he didn't expect to be debating someone that was so blatantly and flagrantly dishonest. It was rather astounding. Even when called on the bullshit he would literally repeat the same lie 30 seconds later. Plus Romney came out and did a 180 on half the shit he's been saying the last couple of weeks. You can never tell which Romney you're going to get because he's pretty much a pathological liar at this point.

That said, Obama's campaign has always played a long game and always works the rope a dope. They did it to McCain in 2008 too, laid low in debate one to gather ammo than flogged him like a dog in round two. Romney most certainly tied a generous amount of rope around his neck last night. The lying, contradictions with his own positions, arrogance, rudeness and weird nervous coked up behaviour are going to sink him in round #2.

The same approach won't work on Obama twice and the only thing that carried Romney was basically acting like a coked up used car salesmen. If he can't maintain that pace in #2 he'll be seen as a loser but that pace won't work twice on Obama.

Personally I thought Romney came across as a slimey, arrogant bully that was just yammering off talking points as fast as possible. Be they true or not. You could see Obama's complete disbelief on the split screen at several points. But this is Obama's problem. He still has faith in humanity and keeps trying to treat the GOP as adults. Rather than the petulant, spiteful children they act like >.>

[daleduke17]

I want a candidate, and I don't care which one at this point, to address military spending. It's the giant pink elephant in the room in terms of our budget, but nobody wants to talk about it.

Gary Johnson would be your pick then. He wants to cut military spending by 43%

[Rapscallion]

That's an oddly specific number.

Rapscallion

[mikoyan29]

I want a candidate, and I don't care which one at this point, to address military spending. It's the giant pink elephant in the room in terms of our budget, but nobody wants to talk about it.

I don't know if it is the giant pink elephant in the room but it is pretty huge. It is the main reason why I disregard any spending plan that says it is going to leave social security, medicaid and defense spending alone. When you consider those three items are 2/3's of our budget and revenue is currently 2/3's of our budget. If you are going to eliminate the deficit by cutting spending alone and leave those three alone, you would have to eliminate everything else the Government does. And I'm not sure that Romney's banking buddies would be happy if the Government stopped paying interest on current debt.

Personally, if I were going to address defense spending, I would want to tackle it from the cost overruns that seem to incur on every project. But that seems to be more of a function of the military having to hit home runs every time they get new stuff.....it's not the incremental improvements of years past. Also because of this, if we get stuck with a white elephant (the F-22), we're pretty much screwed because it means we either need to stretch that many more years out of existing planes or hope the next one is not a white elephant (and signs on the F-35 are point to yes....).

Personally the question I'd like to see in the debate is this one...."So Mr. Romney, your effective tax rate is around 14%. Most working people's effective tax rates are higher than that. Yet you say the "job creators" are taxed too much. Can you explain how?"