No Debate: Romney KO’s Obama and Liberal Media
Leading up to last night’s presidential debate I was in lockstep agreement with the premise that the liberal mainstream media, however the actual debate unfolded, would declare Barack Obama the hands-down winner. By a landslide. By every measure. No contest.
To change that narrative would’ve taken a wholly abysmal and floundering performance by Obama and a clearly stellar one by Mitt Romney. Both candidates delivered, and by night’s end even the most aggressively progressive and unabashedly liberal of the mainstream media cheerleading squad was calling the debate a complete disaster for their favored One.
How decidedly bad was it? Bad enough that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews went from a warm Obama tingle to a full-blown tantrum with his post-debate analysis:
Meanwhile, The Politico weighed in with a look at how both campaigns were handling the aftermath of the carnage:
Romney’s aides and surrogates sprinted into the spin room to offer effusive assessments of their candidate’s performance, and Fox News contributor Juan Williams was caroling “Massacre! Massacre!” to himself as he bounded out of the men’s restroom. Obama’s team didn’t meet the press for a full 10 minutes — and one top Democrat, asked to say the best thing about the president’s performance, said Obama has been “just working to maintain cool and be reassuring” …
The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan was equally despondent in his live-blogging of the debate:
10.31 pm. Look: you know how much I love the guy, and you know how much of a high information viewer I am, and I can see the logic of some of Obama’s meandering, weak, professorial arguments. But this was a disaster for the president for the key people he needs to reach, and his effete, wonkish lectures may have jolted a lot of independents into giving Romney a second look.
CNN’s flash poll taken after the debate bears out that distinct possibility, with Romney crushing it by every measure. A whopping 67% of respondents said Romney won the overall debate, with 25% giving the nod to Obama. Even more encouraging, 58% of respondents said Romney appeared the stronger leader, compared to 37% for Obama, while responses to which candidate would better handle specific issues were equally telling: the economy – Romney 55%, Obama 43%; healthcare – Romney 52%, Obama 47%; taxes – Romney 53%, Obama 44%; the federal budget deficit – Romney 57%, Obama 41%.
Can Romney carry those types of numbers and retain that public sentiment moving forward? Dunno. But if he stays on his game like he did last night, he’s headed down the right path, making clear how ruinous Obama’s tenure at the helm has been in a way that even his most ardent supporters find hard to defend. A taste from last night’s debate, with Romney schooling The One on taxes and the role of government:
The president has a view very similar to the view he had when he ran four years, that a bigger government, spending more, taxing more, regulating more — if you will, trickle-down government — would work.
That’s not the right answer for America.
…
The people who are having the hard time right now are middle- income Americans. Under the president’s policies, middle-income Americans have been buried. They’re just being crushed. Middle- income Americans have seen their income come down by $4,300. This is a — this is a tax in and of itself. I’ll call it the economy tax. It’s been crushing.
At the same time, gasoline prices have doubled under the president. Electric rates are up. Food prices are up. Health care costs have gone up by $2,500 a family. Middle-income families are being crushed.
When Obama countered that Romney’s sole fiscal solution was to dole out $5 trillion in tax breaks for wealthy fat cats – a claim so detached from reality that even CBS News’ fact-check was forced to flag it as bogus – it only opened the door for Romney to lob another zinger:
I know that you and your running mate keep saying that and I know it’s a popular thing to say with a lot of people, but it’s just not the case. Look, I’ve got five boys. I’m used to people saying something that’s not always true, but just keep on repeating it and ultimately hoping I’ll believe it. But that is not the case.
And what happens when somebody actually has the stones to call out The One on his distortions and lies? Obama was so flummoxed by the free-flowing exchange on the tax question, that he literally threw in the towel: “You may want to move onto another topic,” Obama nudged debate moderator Jim Lehrer.
Other topics proved equally troubling for Obama and similarly golden for Romney, who offered up this on the federal deficit:
I think it’s not just an economic issue, I think it’s a moral issue. I think it’s, frankly, not moral for my generation to keep spending massively more than we take in, knowing those burdens are going to be passed on to the next generation and they’re going to be paying the interest and the principal all their lives. And the amount of debt we’re adding, at a trillion a year, is simply not moral.
…
The president said he’d cut the deficit in half. Unfortunately, he doubled it. Trillion-dollar deficits for the last four years. The president’s put in place as much public debt — almost as much debt held by the public as al prior presidents combined.
And the hits kept coming with Romney dismantling Obamacare, of all things, picking it apart point by point:
When you look at Obamacare, the Congressional Budget Office has said it will cost $2,500 a year more than traditional insurance. So it’s adding to cost. And as a matter of fact, when the president ran for office, he said that, by this year, he would have brought down the cost of insurance for each family by $2,500 a family. Instead, it’s gone up by that amount.
Second reason, it cuts $716 billion from Medicare to pay for it. I want to put that money back in Medicare for our seniors.
Number three, it puts in place an unelected board that’s going to tell people ultimately what kind of treatments they can have. I don’t like that idea.
Fourth, there was a survey done of small businesses across the country, said, what’s been the effect of Obamacare on your hiring plans? And three-quarters of them said it makes us less likely to hire people. I just don’t know how the president could have come into office, facing 23 million people out of work, rising unemployment, an economic crisis at the — at the kitchen table, and spend his energy and passion for two years fighting for Obamacare instead of fighting for jobs for the American people. It has killed jobs.
Romney even went after the sacred cows of so-called green jobs and alternative energy championed, at exorbitant cost and scant success, by Obama:
You put $90 billion into — into green jobs. And I — look, I’m all in favor of green energy. $90 billion, that would have — that would have hired 2 million teachers. $90 billion.
And these businesses, many of them have gone out of business, I think about half of them, of the ones have been invested in have gone out of business. A number of them happened to be owned by people who were contributors to your campaigns.
And more about those green businesses:
… Solyndra and Fisker and Tester and Ener1. I mean, I had a friend who said you don’t just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers, all right? So this — this is not — this is not the kind of policy you want to have if you want to get America energy secure.
The whole debate transcript is here, with video here; all in all, a better than good night for Team Romney. The question that lingers is twofold: how much will it matter and how much of it do you believe?
Thoughts.
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