Coming into tonight’s first presidential debate, the polls and most of the mainstream media were all agreed on the fact that President Obama was coasting to a win in November. But after more than 90 minutes on the stage in Denver, there was little doubt the campaign had changed. After months of gaffes, ineffective strategies and relentless pounding from Democrats, Romney had debated his way back into the race.
Despite being allowed four less minutes than Obama, Romney used his time to score point after point on the economy, entitlements and ObamaCare. The challenger looked confident, sure of his facts and able to connect with the viewers. By contrast, the president looked angry and offended most of the night, almost as if he regarded the need to defend his policies was beneath his dignity. The result was a lopsided debate that provided Romney with his finest moment of his long slog toward the presidency, while Obama suddenly looks very beatable.
Democrats grasping at straws may contend that while Obama lost, there were no game-changing moments in the debate that will transform the race. But Romney’s use of the key phrase “trickle down government” to describe Obama’s approach to the economy was telling. So, too, was the spectacle of Obama smirking and refusing to look at the challenger. It not only conjured up memories of Al Gore’s telling sighs while George W. Bush spoke, it also gave the public an excellent idea of his arrogance. After four years of not being asked tough questions by an accommodating mainstream media, being confronted by someone who refused to take him at face value looked like it shocked and dismayed him.
Romney was the focused CEO presenting a coherent plan for his approach to government while reminding us of Obama’s failures. Obama was long-winded and rambled on almost every issue. He seemed flat and unprepared, lacking clear ideas about the economy other than his desire to tax the rich. Romney tied everything to his desire to create jobs and acted as if he knew the issues better than the supposedly brilliant president. Confronted with an Obama riposte about cutting education spending and oil company subsidies, Romney executed a neat slam-dunk by pointing out the vast sums the president had wasted on green energy boondoggles for Democratic donors.
One telling point was that President Obama’s presentation omitted the vicious personal attacks on Romney that have been the keynote of his entire campaign. But face to face with the former Massachusetts governor, he seemed to lack the will to use these attacks and it showed that without the smears, he hasn’t all that much to say about his opponent. That’s a crucial flaw, since the president doesn’t have much of a record to run on, as even he seemed to admit himself in his downbeat closing statements. But absent mention of the 47 percent gaffe or smears about Romney killing babies or throwing grandma over the cliff, Obama has nothing.
It should be stipulated that one debate doesn’t decide an election. Obama’s advantages with the media and his historic status as the first African-American president are still crucial. And it’s likely he’ll do better in subsequent debates. But a time when many were counting Romney out, he didn’t just win the debate but may have also debunked the notion that he couldn’t win the election. We’ll have to see how much of a bounce the Republican gets in the polls this week. It will also be interesting to see whether on the heels of this terrible night, the next monthly jobs report has a bigger impact on public opinion on the race than the September report.
But no matter what lies ahead, Romney has energized his base (conservatives will ignore the fact that he moved to the center on taxes because he gives them hope about victory in November), discouraged Democrats and showed for the first time in months that Barack Obama has feet of clay. This election is up for grabs.
Mitt Romney debates his way back into the race? An understatement to say the least. He stomped all over Obama. The election was probably decided tonight.
I almost think that Mitt Romney without his campaign staff around him does a better job. n nAll Romney has to do is show just how empty a suit Obama is and he has the victory. n nAnd WHAT $2M that the DoD neither needs nor wants?
Mitt Romney debates his way back into the race? I disagree totally with the assumption that he was out of the race.
Agree n n n n n n n
Tonight was a good night; I kept watching and hoping that America had the same impression of the debates that I did. Based on the flash polls and responses of the talking heads, I think they did. Time to reach into my wallet and pony up some money for the campain's final stretch. We've got a horserace!
Rmoney was never out of the race; the National Journal poll released yesterday had the race tied, with a D+7 electorate. In other words, Romney was ahead in that poll. Could we please stop spreading that meme?
Exactly right, Blue! I cannot understand why seemingly all the Commentary writers accept these biased polls as meaningful. Just because there are 6 or 7 liberal media outlets obtaining poll results tailored to favor Obama doesn't make them any more reliable. Stick with Rasmussen (and even Rasmussen is being cautious in his turnout/party affiliation models).
If that is the poll Alana was quoting yesterday, the most significant thing was the change from the earlier one done by the same folk. n nThe variance in both would be consistent — the same errors that had led to Obama being ahead earlier were present when they showed the race tied — and when CBS says that Romney won the debate — well that truly is significant.
I think you guys pay too much attention to the presidential polls and the mainstream media. Gallup says 60% of the population has little or no trust in what the formerly mainstream media says. Pew says only 9% of the people called actually answer the phone and agree to participate in the useless polls we keep hearing about. Get with the program – the race always was much closer than Obama's flacks in the media wanted to admit.
You are right, Runaway Train. The mainstream media is well paid to spit lies and tilted polls, don't listen to them. Even the idiots of this country know how they operate, hardly anyone I know listens to the television media other than the weather. We need jobs, and who can better create them between a lawyer and a successful businessman who has turned bankrupt companies into success? The idiots of the world will get surgery from a barber? I do not think so, even they will pick the well trained one for their problem. So, if we have HYPERINFLATION, blame the blind loyalists…..
4 short years ago, Obama was hailed as 'sort of like a God' by Time magazine. n nToday, he was finally exposed as 'sort of like a college kid with socialist ideas whose benefactors paid for the education he largely skipped classes in order to smoke dope and do coke'.
only to become President where he continues the behaviors by skipping out on his national intelligence briefings or most every chance to meet with intel officials so he can stay out on the golf course or jet all over the country getting love from star-struck supporters– his new drug of choice, it seems.
Obama has never been confronted by MSM, especially the lies he tells. They have always coddled him. Well, as his mentor Rev. Wright says: "the chickens have come home to roost"!!
You say he debated his way back into the race, I don't think he was ever out of the race except for the liberal propaganda media, and that will not change. He did do very well in Debate 1 but the Public Relations firms of MSNBC and V+CNN with the assitance of the NYT and WAPO will no doubt telling you that you are stupid and Obama won. n nIt is what they do for their hero.
They, at least, aren't trying to say Obama won (so far), but they are trying to criticize Romney on no details and no substance — which isn't convincing, but suggests that if they can't praise Obama, they'll try to find anything to criticize Romney on (which, come to think of it, is exactly what they were doing before the debate, like with their claims of so-called Romney gaffes). Maybe this time the MSM will also be like the emperor with no clothes!
Mitt Romney looked and sounded like the substantive candidate. He sounded comforting and competent. Mr Obama seemed every bit the arrogant poser that he is.
Obama clearly was uncomfortable being in the least challenged or questioned about anything he typically casts down on we mortals from the heights of Mt Olympus
Let's hope that Romney continues and expands on this tactic, by challenging Obama and confronting him with his failures and contradictions. This will always get to Obama no matter how prepped he is beforehand. It is Obama's Achilles' heel: thin skinned and intellectually shallow.
If the needle doesn't move, at least some, in Romney's direction, then there's either something really wrong with the polling or the electorate.
I would say the electorate. There is something very wrong with an electorate that would trust someone like Obama under any conditions, debate or not. He is a measure of an immature people.
I guess Obama spent too much time laughing about all the 'zingers' Chris Matthews kept promising. When you don't prep against a guy with 2 Harvard graduate degrees you get your head handed to you.
Heh. And Romney no doubt earned them, too.
A telling moment on arrogance? Obama demanded a detailed plan as to how Romney would carry out his tax goals. Romney said that he had learned as governor that trying to dictate a detailed preconceived plan to the legislature was a recipe for stalemate, and that he would need to work closely with the leaders of both parties to develope a plan and move it through Congress. What a contrast with our current president, who fancies himself the Supreme Intelligence!
One *huge* point I kept waiting for Romney to make all through the debate was the ridiculous budgets that Obama has submitted each year to Congress. Obama talks about responsible deficit reduction… where's the proof of sincerity? He has none! Every budget Obama has submitted to Congress has received *zero* support from even the Democrats. Harry Reid saw those budgets as so toxic that he wouldn't even allow them to be debated or see the light of day in the Senate.
It was a long time coming. The bubble that should have burst no later than at the end of the non–Recovery Summer of 2010 finally did so last night, 3 October 2012, circa 10 PM EDT. n nEqually important is the question of exactly whose bubble it was that did not so much burst as explode. It was not, for the most part, the expectations of the majority of voters that were annihilated. They have been very responsible, telling anyone who cared to ask that they are QUITE unhappy with Barack Obama, and for some time now, too. No, it was the illusions of the mainstream media that finally could no longer be sustained. For three years the areas of public policy and presidential competency that the media could NOT look at honestly, hence were forced to ignore if their visas for residing in Happy Horses**t Land (issued in 2008) were not to expire, those areas of no-go reportage, I say, had come to consume nearly all the visible political universe. n nLet's review the bidding. Reporters could not look at economic or employment prospects. The blinders went on and the shades came down permanently with respect to those topics years ago, not to be gazed on or spoken of again. Health care and entitlements? Way too ugly to contemplate, and getting uglier, since early 2011. The public complexions of various governing departments such as Energy, Homeland Security, the National Security Council, and State are pockmarked, blistered, pus-oozing, and carbuncled beyond stomaching by major and continually metastasizing lesions such as Solyndra, Fast & Furious, Keystone, Stuxnet, four-dollar gas, Israel, Iran, Syria, and Russia, without a hint of a rosy glow at the horizon that might tempt the unwary to remove his blast goggles any time soon. n nSay, have I mentioned the deficit or the debt yet? When it came to those infelicities, it's been strictly a matter of breaking out plenty of garlic wreathes and crucifixes insofar as Brian Williams was consulted. n nThe political landscape has also been a vast wasteland of gloom and despondency since (a) the 2010 elections, (b) the Massachusetts special Senate election of 2011—truly a sharp stick in the eye if ever there was a stick or an eye— and, as bad, (c) the June 2012 recall election in Wisconsin because it showed that even in a "progressive" State, the Progressives were being shown the one-way door en bloc. Iraq? Better not bring THAT up. Afghanistan? What's an 'Afghanistan'? Throw in the meteoric rise and fall of the Occupy Movement, which briefly seemed to offer the MSM a heaven-sent, heart-gladdening spectacle on which to feast without fear, but instead turned out to be a cruel bit of trompe d'oeil deviltry, and the media had arrived at a claustrophobic place from which they had virtually nowhere to look safely, with little to comment on that would not, if observed too directly, like the face of Medusa turn everything stone dead. n nI say virtually because there WAS the death of bin Laden on which to fix the attention, so of course that event became the navel of the universe. But even there the unseemliness, not to mention sheer ridiculousness, of a couch-potato football fan and weekend duffer all but claiming to have personally punched Osama's ticket, was, well, becoming icky. To be honest, it was beginning to smell. Bad. But still, it was something; so that if you held your outspread fingers over your face and peeked just so between the thumb and the index finger while squinting, it looked not half-bad, almost. Then came Libya, and even that was gone. n nStill there was THE final illusion of President Obama's likability and glib oratorical style. Surely Chris Matthews and company could rest confident that the first presidential debate would spark a final bout of old-time religion. They could at least watch THAT eyes wide open, couldn't they? n nWell, it's turned out that they can't, hasn't it? Everything they have had to say about Romney and the President for the past three years—and I do mean every solitary last and little thing—has been abruptly emptied of sense, logic, and credibility. In an hour and a half! How in heck could that HAPPEN? A lightning strike could not have wiped the smile off Howard Fineman's face with more brutal efficiency. And now they have NOWHERE to look except, possibly, at Mitt Romney's tax returns, which, let's face it, most MSM reporters are too stupid to understand and make them sleepy. Last night Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz looked like Adam and Eve the morning after expulsion from the Garden. n nToday, this AM, they are desperately flailing about trying to pin the blame on poor old Jim Lehrer!!! Who'd ever have guessed that HE was the problem? Something NO ONE could have suspected or even thought within the compass of possibility. Before last night, that is. Now anything is preferable, even smearing a dependable liberal icon like Lehrer, to facing the bursting of the LAST bubble: Obama, stripped of his blanky and teleprompter, is and likely always has been the emptiest of empty suits, a B-actor in a too demanding role who should have been thrown off the studio lot at the first casting call. n nAnd looming out there, like the berg that did for the Titanic, are TWO MORE DEBATES. Popcorn sales should go through the roof this month.
Or Obama "wags the dog." Sarah Palin may be many things, but stupid is not one of them and she already is warning that they might try something.
Hopefully there are enough intelligent people in this country who understand that the mass media have committed an act of treason against the American people by siding with the incumbent, shielding the incumbent and lying systematically about M. Romney and covering up for criminal mistakes committed by the Obama administration towards Americans. nThe left and the mass media will try more dirty & vicious attacks. Typical "commies" ideology!
Great performance by Romney last night. All of my ultra-liberal Democratic friends are shocked, stunned that their brilliant Israel-bashing President is actually an empty suit. Time for them to come to their senses. I cringe at the thought of a second Obama term – when he would have no reason to "support" Israel. Thank you, Mitt, for turning the tide.
THE WINNER— MITT ROMNEY !!! OK, Mitt won the first round. The main thing I wish to express is for Mitt to not let this win go to his head. He must not let up one once of pressure on this President. He must ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK !!! Mr. Romney, do not ever allow Mr. Obama to put you on the defensive. If he does try I urge you to come back with an attack instead of going into a defensive position. You have plenty of facts to attack him on. Good Luck !!!