The Debate--Romney

Debate:  Verdict Romney

From CBS:  

In the moments following the candidates' performances on the University of Denver stage, 46 percent of voters gave the economy-centric debate to Romney, 22 percent said they believed the president was the winner, and 32 percent called it a tie. More good news for the GOP nominee: 56 percent of those polled said they viewed Romney in a better light after watching the debate. Eleven percent said their opinion of him dropped, and 32 percent cited no change in opinion.

From CNN: 

Republican Mitt Romney won Wednesday night's first presidential debate with President Barack Obama, according to a CNN/ORC International poll of registered voters who watched the nationally televised event.

Sixty-seven percent of those surveyed said Romney fared better, compared with 25 percent for Obama, according to results aired on CNN after the match concluded. Forty-six percent said they found Romney more likable, compared with 45 percent for Obama, CNN reported.

The CNN poll interviewed 430 Americans by telephone after the debate and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points.

A note of interest on this one.  The pundits were looking at the demographics and one said that there were more Republicans than you normally see.  James Carville raised his hands in victory saying that must be why it was so lopsided.  He couldn’t believe that Romney had 56% favorable.  Today I saw the demographics and there were 37% Democrats, 33% Republicans and 29% independents.  They still had a +4 Democratic poll and 67% of the poll called it for Romney.

Left Wing Pundits unhappy

The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan called Obama “tired,” “bored” and wrote that he might have even lost the election.

“He choked. He lost. He may even have lost the election tonight,” Sullivan wrote, later adding, “Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument; he wasn’t there. He was entirely defensive, which may have been the strategy. But it was the wrong strategy. At the wrong moment.”

Right Wing Pundits find new respect for Romney

I’ve long been a critic of Governor Romney and frankly have lacked enthusiasm for his campaign.  Tonight Mitt Romney changed my stance in a big way.  On the debate stage in Denver I saw a man who wasn’t afraid to get specific and who wasn’t afraid to articulate conservative principles like States rights.  My favorite moment in the debate is when President Obama asked Governor Romney to clarify that he wouldn’t raise taxes on the rich and Romney responded emphatically that he wouldn’t, the look on the President’s face was priceless.

It was a good point.  He used Obama’s quote from two years ago (it’s the wrong thing to raise taxes in a recession) to support his position and said he would cut spending and grow the economy to reduce the deficit.  I’m sure Obama will protest this in the next debate, but Obama can’t unring this bell. 

A Right Wing Pundit looks at the reactions from both the right and left

Slaughter. It was a slaughter.

Mitt Romney put on the most commanding presidential debate performance of the insta-commentary era. One could literally watch, on Facebook and Twitter, hundreds of people on both sides of the political divide react in real time as the debate went on.

Their reactions were identical, though their moods were not: As Romney dominated exchange after exchange with a surprisingly effective combination of pointed personal touches and remarkable factual preparation, conservatives and Republicans grew more and more jubilant while liberals and Democrats grew more and more alarmed.

Will the Debate cause Obama to change strategy

Obama’s strategy had been to make Mitt Romney an unacceptable choice.  This debate makes that strategy inoperable, so where does Obama go?

Romney won big time

But tonight Romney brilliantly dismantled the straw man Obama has been running against for months. I think it was David Freddoso who said on Twitter that if all you knew about Romney was what you saw in Obama’s TV ads, you’d get the sense that Obama’s been lying to you all this time. Romney helped himself tonight — possibly a lot.

Going along with the previous article, I think he did himself a lot of good dismantling the last six months of Obama’s campaign and the million so dollars Obama spent to paint Romney as Richie Rich. 

Was a fawning media the cause of Obama’s poor performance?

For so long Barack Obama has assumed that he will not face cross-examination from the media that he simply has little grasp of policy details, and in exasperation seems to look around for the accustomed helpful media crutch. But there is no such subsidy in a one-on-one debate, and only now it becomes clear just how the media for the last six years have enfeebled their favorite.

An interesting question.  Watching Chris Matthews go bananas tonight telling Obama what he needed to do (watch MSNBC) was pleasurable.  It always seems that there are people ready to tell you what you need to do to win. 

The perfect storm:  Obama was very bad and Mitt was very good

A historic defeat for a sitting president.  Never has a POTUS been this badly whupped in a debate.  It is that simple.

It wasn't just that Obama was so bad, but that Romney was so good.  Conservatives see a candidate they did not know they had, and independents see a candidate who could turn the country around.  No way to predict what this will do to campaign over a week.

Take aways: trickle down government, "you pick losers," and Solyndra and other green energy expenditures of 90 billion could have been 2 million teachers.

Obama’s Cutter complains about the Ref

Stephanie sounding like an NLF fan complaining about the replacement refs, complained that Jim Lehrer let Romney act as the moderator of the debate. 

Is Obama bright?

In the last election cycle we were told that Obama is the brightest star we’ve had who ran for president since Thomas Jefferson.  He was a Constitutional Scholar, the editor of the Law Review at Harvard, a man who would fix all that is wrong in not just America, but the world.  And even the Swedes believed it as they awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize for….just being Obama.  

But after last night’s debacle, after seeing him seemingly clueless, you have to ask the question is Barack Obama bright?  Perhaps he could release his college grades to give us a clue.

Here’s another possibility.  Perhaps he just lazy.