Foreign policy and Biden

Jim Lehrer has no regrets

Moderator of the first debate, Jim Lehrer has no regrets about his role last week.  He got Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama talking.  It is humorous that Clint Eastwood got criticized for insinuating that President Obama was an empty chair and Lehrer has gotten equal criticism for letting Mr. Obama prove it.

CBS correspondent:  Obama is lying to America

It appears Obama is lying to America regarding the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  They haven’t gone away.

The foreign policy debate isn’t going to be the cakewalk Obama and the Democrats imagined even a month ago. 

Obama votes present on Foreign Policy

It appears the US rejected taken any action while the Benghazi attack was taking place, the moral equivalent of voting present.  Is anyone surprised?

Romney finds his voice on Foreign Policy

At VMI, Romney found his voice again. "The attack on our consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, was likely the work of forces affiliated with those that attacked our homeland on Sept. 11, 2001," Romney said. "This latest assault cannot be blamed on a reprehensible video insulting Islam, despite the administration's attempts to convince us of that for so long."

Romney says it well which is bad news for President Obama.

Biden has some “splanin” to do at the debate

Joe Biden has been a big cheerleader for President Obama praising him for killing bin Laden and saying the Mitt Romney wouldn’t have done the same.  But this is a bit hypocritical since, “One problem with that: Joe Biden opposed the mission that killed Osama bin Laden.”  That’s right, when old Joe tells us that President Obama made a difficult call and Romney wouldn’t have (hypothetical on the Romney part) we do know that the VP wouldn’t have made the same call.

What will Biden do?

Some Democrats may want Biden to come out of the blocks attacking relentlessly Thursday night. The Obama campaign brain trust may feel that their base has been left so shaken by Obama’s performance last week, that it needs to see a Democrat tearing apart his opponent as cruel, heartless, reckless, and so on.

But if Biden’s the designated attack dog of the Obama campaign, he’s also proven, time and again, to be a high-risk one.

Obama draws Tea Party Crowd in San Francisco

And nice article with a lot of pictures on a protest and counter protest at an Obama fund raiser in San Francisco.  Two notables here include the Tea Party chanting “pick up your trash” when the pro-Obama people started to leave and the sign above regarding eye candy.

The New Republic gives the liberal case for reelection

I found the editorial interesting if insipid in its reasoning.  For instance, they go against history and logic in stating the following: 

At times, Barack Obama has failed to appreciate the virulence of the modern Republican Party. He has earnestly entered negotiations with adversaries interested in breaking his presidency, not splitting the difference.

Mr. Obama has never entered negotiations “earnestly.”  He entered as a Chicago style politician whose basic modality was “my way or the highway.”  Evidently the author hasn’t read Bob Woodward’s new book The Path to Power.  And the splitting the difference meme doesn’t work if the other side thinks we are on the wrong road.  “Let’s go another two weeks down this road” doesn’t work to compromise and offer to go one week, if the other side is convinced we are on the wrong road and you’ve already been going down it for the past 4 years.

Pew Poll:  Romney’s amazing turnaround

What a difference a month makes.  Look at the difference among women!

Romney erases Obama’s big lead in Michigan

Obama’s 10 percentage point lead (47%-37%) in a poll conducted last month by EPIC-MRA of Lansing dropped to 3 points (48% to 45%), according to the poll of 600 likely voters conducted by EPIC-MRA of Lansing. The gap between Romney and Obama was within the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Undecided voters shrank from the September survey’s 16% to just 7%.

The undecided voters went 1 for Obama and 8 for Romney.  Look to this to be a pattern.

The White House thought they had Romney beaten

“Inside the White House, Romney was such an object of ridicule that it was hard to take him seriously, difficult to narrow the mass of contempt into a single, coherent narrative for not electing the presumptive GOP nominee.”

The problem you have is that if you only get information and opinions from inside your echo chamber, you will find that you may be missing

The Left reacts to Romney’s attack on their church

The Catholics may be upset by Obama’s attack on their church, but the left has joined them in their outrage for Romney’s attack on their church.

Romney dared to declare we shouldn't borrow money to subsidize this attitude adjustment operation.

And there the Left's love of the Establishment Clause ended. CPB, PBS and NPR are their church, and their saints are involved, their beads and incense, their vision of the future.

Is calling President Obama lazy racist?

On Chris Matthews' weekend talk show, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell and Time Magazine's Joe Klein teamed up to insulate President Obama from attack, insinuating that questioning the President's intelligence and work ethic in the wake of a lackluster debate performance is racist.

But didn’t someone very close the President already call him lazy?  

Barbara Walters, ABC News: "What's the trait you most deplore in yourself, and the trait you most deplore in others?" 

President Obama: "Laziness."

The Obama Narrative

In the very best postmodern fashion, Obama and his supporters have relied on a narrative about Obama that has been carefully constructed. He’s brilliant, a great writer, a rare thinker, a moderate, a first-class temperament with neatly pressed pants, a uniter, a cool guy who’s unflappable.

The first debate last Wednesday threatened to make that narrative seem absurd. You might say that the narrative got mugged by reality, and an awful lot of people were watching while it happened.

But the next day there was a new narrative in place — or rather, several narratives: Romney cheated, the altitude was too high for Obama, he didn’t have time to practice because he was too busy with weighty matters, Romney lied, and look at those great unemployment numbers!

Those numbers themselves are another narrative, one that no one can quite figure out because there’s a disparity between one part of the stats and other parts. In a very real sense, the numbers don’t seem to add up. But they’re good for the Obama narrative, unless you think too deeply about them.

But one of the points of a narrative is not to think too deeply about it.

Adkins catches a break

It appears there is a scandal in Missouri only this time it doesn’t involve Todd Adkin, but his opponent Senator Claire McCaskill.  The AP is reporting “Businesses affiliated with the husband of Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill have received almost $40 million in federal subsidies for low-income housing developments during her first five years in office.” I expect to see the polls close between these two.

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.