saintfan

Alright. One down two to go. Standard fare really IMO.

What do y'all think?

Halo

I had no idea Romney was that strong and aggressive of a debater.
Felt Obama was on his heals the entire time.
Definitely felt Obama looked out of his element.
Romney was an encyclopedia of facts and stats. It was impressive.
Romney controlled the debate

The debate was a free-for-all and Jim Lehrer just let them roll. Both sides were running over the moderator.

We'll see what if any impact comes from the debate soon. Democrats were in full apology mode, thought GOP got a confidence boost.
Next debate is traditionally more structured and controlled.
The open format for cat fight purposes is typical in the first debate.

saintfan

Even the CNN poll shows Romney a winner with 67%. I'm surprised. And frankly Obama really crumbles when he's off the teleprompter. It's a stunning difference.

I'm already looking forward to the vice president debate. I'm not usually this interested because it's all spin, but tonight, I confess, was fun to watch, and the media almost can't believe the poll numbers that have followed.

This is better than watching the Failclowns lose.

SmashMouth

Agree on all points above. It was indeed entertaining and refreshing. Obummer came through with shining colors as REALLY needing a teleprompter, looking totally befuddled and unprepared, not that he actually had defensible positions to begin with.
It was akin to watching the Saints beat the Colts in that sixty burger game.

SloMotion

I too was a bit surprised at Romney's debating skills. Can you imagine Jim Lehrer moderating a thread on B&G? It would be a free-for-all, .

I'm looking for contrast between the candidates and I'm not sure if I see all that much. A few distinct issues like Medicare and Energy surfaced.

The President did seem a bit off his game. Obama scored some points, but seemed a little put off by Romney's aggressive style and insistence on refuting any or all of the claims he made about Romney's policies/plans. The President did not seem ready or prepared to counter Romney's 'counters', IMO.

The President may have been the favorite going in, but I have to hand it to Mitt for coming out swinging. I think we'll see a different Obama in the next debate now that they know what to expect.

Score 'one' for the Mitt-ster.

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Srgt. Hulka

The President looked last night just like he's looked to the rest of the world for four years...WEAK.

Soooo....Are you saying Halo should moderate the next debate?

dam1953

Obama's facial expressions reminded me of when Ryan schooled him on the major problems with Obamacare during the Feb 2010 health care summit. Now as then, he had this look that said either I don't give a flying f*** about what you're saying or I have no clue as to what you're talking about. Either way, last night the public saw that Eastwood was right in debating an empty chair. The empty chair would have performed better.

Srgt. Hulka

Obama better hope that a kicked ass is covered under Obamacare.

saintfan

Oooo, that's gonna sting a little.

SmashMouth

The following is also a good analysis from Neal Boortz:

I’ve got to be honest, heading into last night’s debate I was totally expecting Obama to do very well. That doesn’t mean I thought he was going to be playing honestly with the facts .. it was more the fact that I recognize that Obama has some exceptional wordsmiths working for him who certainly will have given him some devastating sound bites that would be the highlight of the evening.
As we got into this debate I started wondering if I was really hearing what I thought I was hearing? Was Romney really doing this well? Was Obama really doing this badly? I was sending out my pithy tweets during the debate … and reading hundreds (thousands?) of tweets from others. I kept seeing tweets referring to the thrashing Romney was delivering to Obama … but was it true? I mean, that’s what I was hearing from the TV, but was this really going on? I was so surprised by this that I just couldn’t bring myself to put one of those “Romney is destroying Obama” tweets out there. This morning, though, after thinking about the debate and reading the comments from people on the right and the left, it’s all-too clear. Romney walked away the victor last night – hands down – no doubt. In fact, I’m now convinced that if the debate had lasted just five minutes longer Obama would have walked over to Romney and would have bitten off a chunk of Romney’s ear.
Now that’s not to say that Romney was spot-on perfect. He got the job done, but there were some points he could have inserted that would have made the victory all that more clear cut. I’ll get to some of those in a second. But the bottom line here is that I went to sleep last night feeling a little bit better about the future of this country. Just a little. Because, let’s face it, there remains a lot of potential voters out there who aren’t all that bright. I heard the phrase “economic illiteracy” on a news show this morning. That pretty well sums it up. Obama’s appeal is to the economically illiterate … and it’s tough to get the information to them that they will actually assimilate. Then don’t know what they don’t know and are happy with the facts as they know them .. right or wrong.
Although, Obama’s performance last night was so uncharacteristically poor that even some media sycophants are admitting today that Obama was soundly defeated. Others are blaming it on poor old Jim Lehrer. The Soros-funded MediaMatters, for instance, is running a story this morning titled “How Jim Lehrer Lost The Debate.” This theme is being repeated by others and you’ll certainly hear more of it today. When Bill Maher tweets that “Maybe Obama DOES need a teleprompter” you know something has gone horribly wrong.
One thing I did notice almost immediately: When Romney was speaking Obama was looking down. Romney would look directly at Obama when Obama was making his points. Romney looked confident. Obama looked defensive. Obama has been on the defensive without economy at home, and with foreign policy abroad. He brought that same game to the debate last night.
OK .. let’s get to some specifics:
Between his ums, ers, and ahs, Barack Obama did manage to come up with astounding number of ways to describe the evil rich. We have a little montage for you on the show today. Oh and it wouldn’t be a proper debate if he didn’t manage to get in a dig at those corporate jets and the oil companies … unfortunately for him, Romney was ready for him when it came to the oil companies – the $2.8 billion in oil company subsidies each year (the same ones enjoyed by every manufacturing company) pales in comparison to the $90 billion in tax subsidies Obama has provided for green energy.
Obama had no response to Mitt Romney’s many mentions of the $716 billion cut in Medicare that was used to pay for ObamaCare. He also had no response to the fact that the 3% of small businesses that will see their tax rates increase under Obama employ half of all small business employees. Obama also didn’t have a response to the fact that ObamaCare has killed jobs in this country.
Romney’s repeated mention of the unelected ObamaCare board was a great illustration of government tyranny versus personal responsibility. Great move.
I liked Romney’s repeated use of the phrase “trickle-down government” to counter act Obama’s “trickle-down economics” that he accusing Romney of wanting to practice by supposedly showering the rich with tax cuts while hitting the middle class with tax increases. Speaking of that, perhaps we should get to some …
Yesterday I gave you a pre-fact check cheat sheet. This was a list of 9 arguments that Obama has used in the past that have been disproven or found to be misleading. Of the 9, Obama managed to re-use 5 of them.
Claim #1: Mitt Romney wants to increase taxes on the middle class by thousands of dollars per household while giving millionaires a tax cut.
Obama didn’t even seem to understand that tax rates historically result in increase tax revenues for the government. Or maybe he understands this, but knows that most Americans don’t, so he conveniently ignores it thinking, perhaps, that he can let this economic ignorance work for him.
Last night, Obama continued to claim that Mitt Romney wanted to cut taxes by $5 trillion for the “well to do,” which would ultimately be paid for by increasing taxes on the middle class by $2000. This claim is based on a widely disproven analysis by the Tax Policy Center. The fact is that it is flat-out wrong, and makes various assumptions that led to the false $5 trillion claim. The fact that Obama continues to quote the widely discredited study is laughable. If Dear Ruler wants to understand how you can cut taxes, grow the economy and even … wait for it … raise revenue, then perhaps he should pick up the Wall Street Journal every now and then: IRS data show that limiting deductions for high earners would more than cover the dollars lost by reducing income-tax rates 20% across the board.
And here we get to a crucial point in the debate .. and a point that I think Romney could have handled better. When Obama would say that there was no way to lower the tax rates for “millionaires and billionaires” without having to raise taxes on the middle class because there were simply not enough deductions to get rid of to make up for the cut in rates, Romney would respond by saying “I will not reduce the taxes paid by high-income Americans.” Well that sounds confusing to the average government-educated voter. How can you lower tax rates without lowering the taxes paid by the people with the lower tax rates? Romney should have explained this … and here is how he might have done that:
“Mr. President, let me explain this for you and for our viewers out there. Experience shows – with the tax cuts of the 1920s, the Kennedy tax cuts, the Reagan tax cuts – when you cut the tax rates tax revenue to the government actually goes up. Kennedy cut the tax rates and revenues increased by 62 percent. They increased by 54 percent after the Reagan tax cuts. Why? Because highly productive Americans, encouraged by cuts in their tax rates, actually increased their economic output! Their incomes rose, and along with rising incomes, the amount of taxes they paid rose! You just said it’s math … it’s arithmetic. OK .. here’s the math: If you tax a quarter-million dollars at 35% you get about $87,500. If you lower that person’s tax rate to 30%, and they increase their economic production to $300,000, you get $90,000 in taxes! Their tax rates go down, but the amount of taxes they pay go up! THAT, Mr. President, is how you cut tax rates while making sure that taxes are not reduced for high-income Americans, and that is how we can do this without raising taxes on middle income Americans.”
OK .. a little wordy, but now you understand what Romney was saying. That point was never made last night.
Claim #2: The Romney/Ryan plan for Medicare will end Medicare as we know it and cost seniors over $6,000 in increased costs.
This one is misleading because the Obama campaign uses studies based on an earlier version of Ryan’s Medicare plan, not the current proposal which makes the necessary adjustments. And Mitt Romney emphasized many times that this will not affect current or soon-to-be seniors. Hopefully some undecided seniors will understand that there is no way their Medicare is going to be affected by a Romney win.
Claim #3: I want to go back to the Clinton tax rates, where we saw tremendous job growth.
Barack Obama made the assertion last night that we needed to return to the Clinton tax rates, because this was a time in which we saw tremendous job growth. Unfortunately for Obama, he’s taken the wrong lesson from the Clinton era. Here are the facts (which should be nothing new to Nealz Nuze readers)
The fact is that Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax hikes actually slowed economic growth. From 1993 until 1997, the economy grew at a mere 3.3% per year. But what happened after 1997? Tax cuts! The top capital gains rate was cut from 28% to 20%, among other cuts. Here’s what happened as a result, according to the Heritage Foundation:
Business investment skyrocketed after the tax cut, and the economy grew at an annualized rate of 4.4 percent (33 percent faster than after the Clinton tax hike) from 1997 through the end of the Clinton presidency. Real wages reversed their downward trend and grew 1.7 percent per year during the same time.
Then Obama hit on Mitt Romney for wanting to go back to the same approaches we saw in 2001 and 2003 (the Bush years), and disparaged Bush’s tax cuts compared to the higher Clinton rates. But here’s something Obama didn’t tell you: New Congressional Budget Office (CBO) figures show that the top 1% paid 21.3% of all federal taxes from 1993 to 2000, when Clinton was president, but they paid 25.1% from 2003 to 2008, after the Bush tax cuts. If 21.3% was a fair share in the Clinton years, then the top 1% has been paying much more than its fair share since 2003.
Claim #4: We must ask the wealthiest among us to pay a little bit more in taxes in order to start paying down our deficits.
Yup, Obama is still holding onto this pathetic notion that tax increases are going to be the solution to our debt and deficit woes. Too bad for him, I just dismantled that argument just last week in Nealz Nuze. Rather than re-hash it here, you can click on the Nuze entry and read it for yourself: Economic Patriotism.
Claim #5: The Bush tax cuts are what got us into this financial crisis to begin with, and Mitt Romney is advocating the same “trickle” down economics.”
Obama didn’t say it exactly like that last night, but here is what he did say: “The approach that Governor Romney is talking about is the same sales pitch that was made in 2001 and 2003, and we ended up with the slowest job growth in 50 years, we ended moving from surplus to deficits, and it all culminated in the worst financial crisis since the great Depression.” A few things … first of all, there was no such thing as a surplus, as Obama indicated. All there were were projected surpluses based on status factors that did not include 9/11 and a recession. But I’ve debunked this business about the Bush tax cuts causing these massive deficits. I wrote an entire column on it: Bush tax cuts didn’t create the deficit. And to believe that it was tax cuts that caused our financial crisis is a gross misunderstanding of the crisis itself, led by the housing bubble burst, which was fueled by government policies like the Community Reinvestment Act.
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