Romney Goes On Offense, Pays For It In First Wave Of Fact Checks

I was interested in how Romney would distance himself from his plan to bankrupt America. It was easy HE JUST LIED. Romney apparently downed 5 Red Bulls and went on like an enraged sock puppet.

Obama was too light on him but I think appearing presidential scores over being a zealot for the rich.

Five Takeaways From The First Presidential Debate
by Alan Greenblatt - NPR
October 4, 2012

Mitt Romney may have given his campaign something of a reset with his performance in the first debate against President Obama.

He appeared more comfortable on stage than the incumbent, and was able at least to lay the groundwork for a message of bipartisanship that could appeal to remaining undecided voters.

Of course, it's not clear yet whether the debate will create enough momentum to offer Romney an advantage heading into the next debate, let alone through Election Day. Perhaps some of the inevitable post-debate fact checking will challenge Romney's credence on certain points.

But it's notable that Obama failed to do much of that himself, launching far fewer attacks during the debate than his aggressive campaign advertising strategy suggested he might.

Here's a quick review of five takeaways from the first debate in Denver:

Obama Looked Tired And Sounded Defensive

Obama's advisers noted before the debate that the president was having a hard time finding much unbroken debate practice time, and much of what he did have was devoted to boiling down his positions to fit the time limits. All of this showed.

Romney looked straight at his opponent, often wearing a confident Mona Lisa grin. Obama looked down at his notes or over at the moderator, Jim Lehrer of PBS, only occasionally looking directly into the camera.

Aside from his body language, some of Obama's answers came across as wonky. Both men offered laundry lists of their ideas, but Obama failed to craft a compelling case for his own record or second-term agenda, instead repeating complaints that he had inherited a mess.

What's more, he failed to go after Romney aggressively. There was no mention of Bain Capital or Romney's dismissive videotaped comments about the "47 percent" of Americans who are dependent on government.

Only in the last 20 minutes of the 90-minute debate did Obama land much of a blow, complaining that Romney was keeping the specifics about his tax plans and his approaches to health care and banking regulation too much a secret.

Romney Grasped The Mantle Of Bipartisanship

Romney said he didn't want to lay out anything other than broad principles during the campaign, because he found out as Massachusetts governor that a "my way or the highway" approach doesn't win over legislators.

Even before Lehrer had made "partisan gridlock" the subject of his final question, Romney stressed the importance of bipartisanship. He said that something as important as the federal health care law should have been passed on a bipartisan basis (it received essentially no GOP support) and paid homage to the working relationship of Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill in the 1980s.

"I had the great experience — it didn't seem like it at the time — of being elected in a state where my legislature was 87 percent Democrat," Romney said, "and that meant I figured out from day one I had to get along and I had to work across the aisle to get anything done."

Given consistent Republican opposition to Obama in Congress — some have called it obstructionism — no doubt Democrats will question the sincerity of Romney's embrace of bipartisanship. But it's a message that could be welcomed by voters, particularly centrist independents.

You're A Drinking Game Winner If You're Middle Class

Both candidates were at pains to pay tribute to members of the middle class, again and again. Each referred to specific members of the middle class they had met along the campaign trail, who had gone back to school or were now out of work. Each insisted his plan would do more to help such people out and create middle-class jobs.

Obama argued that Romney's plans to cut taxes and increase military spending would necessarily cause the deficit to balloon or "burden" the middle class, because there would not be sufficient savings available to offset their cost by ending deductions or closing loopholes.

Romney insisted that his tax-cut plan would impose no such hardship. "I will not, under any circumstances, raise taxes on middle-income families," he said.

When Candidates Have The Microphone, They'll Keep Talking

Romney sought to refute a study Obama had cited to show his tax package would hurt the middle class was wrong: "There are six other studies that looked at the study you describe and say it's completely wrong," Romney said.

Many of the candidate's responses were like that: Sometimes arcane, often straying from the original question that Lehrer had asked. At one point, Romney used an education question to repeat a charge that Obama had squandered billions on unsuccessful green-energy programs.

Nearly all politicians use debate questions merely as jumping-off points, concerning themselves with highlighting policies they deem most important. Both men did that Wednesday, ignoring Lehrer's frequent invitations to confront or question their opponent directly, in favor of rattling off other arguments of their own.

Partly as a result, the debate's intended format, of 15-minute segments each covering six different topics, was broken almost immediately, leaving only three minutes for the final segment.

Lehrer struggled unsuccessfully to cut off the two candidates and redirect them to the supposed topic at hand. A stammering Twitter handle called @SilentJimLehrer went up during the debate, quickly attracting thousands of followers.

Democrats Will Want To Retool For Future Debates

For all his oratorical gifts, Obama has sometimes struggled in debates. He was often out-mastered during the long series of debates during the Democratic primary season in 2008 and hasn't had much practice since then — except for his debates against Sen. John McCain in 2008.

Republicans, meanwhile, have been nearly salivating for months at the prospect of the vice presidential debate, which takes place on Oct. 11. They believe Romney's running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, has the intellectual and rhetorical firepower to wipe the floor with Vice President Joe Biden.

That may prove to be wishful thinking. Ryan has put many of his own ideas on ice while serving as the loyal No. 2, while Biden is deeply versed in both domestic and foreign policy.

But Obama's lackluster performance — coupled with Biden's remark Tuesday that "the middle class ...has been buried the last four years" — will leave GOP partisans giddy with anticipation of next Thursday's debate.

Debate Praise for Romney as Obama Is Faulted as Flat
Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mitt Romney and President Obama challenged each other on many issues.
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Published: October 4, 2012

The immediate reaction to Wednesday night’s presidential debate was a torrent of criticism directed at President Obama, with Republicans, and as well as many Democrats, accusing Mr. Obama of delivering a flat, uninspired and defensive performance.

Republicans seemed genuinely surprised that his opponent, Mitt Romney, was energetic, aggressive and presidential during his first-ever general election debate.

“In a thoroughly dominating performance, Romney bested Barack Obama in both tone and substance,” Stephen F. Hayes of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine wrote after the debate. “Obama often found himself at the end of a verbal cul-de-sac, seemingly unaware of how he’d ended up there.”

At an impromptu appearance Thursday morning in front of a group of Colorado conservative activists, Mr. Romney said the debate was a contrast of “two visions” and said it was “helpful to be able to describe those visions.”

At the gathering, Mr. Romney reprised his lines from the debate, saying the president’s vision for the country is of “trickle-down government” and criticized Mr. Obama as misleading the public about his plans to cut the deficit.

“Only in Washington would you count $4 trillion in reduction when in fact his plan calls for adding $1 trillion in debt every one of the next four years,” Mr. Romney.

Mr. Romney mentioned Vice President Joeph R. Biden Jr.’s comments about the middle class having been “buried” during the last four years — a word he used during the debate on Wednesday.

“If we continue down his path, there’s no question that the middle class, which the vice president noted has been buried, will continue to be buried with higher and higher expenses for gasoline for food for utilities for health insurance,” he said.

On Twitter, some of Mr. Obama’s Democratic allies expressed anger and disappointment that the president did not make better use of the “47 percent” speech by Mr. Romney and other missteps that the Democratic campaign has spent months honing into attack ads and stump speeches.

Andrew Sullivan, a blogger and strong supporter of Mr. Obama, echoed Peggy Noonan, a former Republican speechwriter, on Twitter, saying that “this is a rolling calamity for Obama.” Mr. Sullivan added: “He’s boring, abstract, and less human-seeming than Romney!”

And Bill Maher, the liberal comedian who had donated $1 million to a “superPAC” backing Mr. Obama, joked: “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Obama looks like he DOES need a teleprompter.”

At this point, it remains unclear whether these snap assessments and others made immediately after the debate will be matched by the more sober judgments of voters in the upcoming days. Voters sometimes surprise the pundits by coming to different conclusions about the outcome of a presidential debate.

And Mr. Obama’s top strategists predicted that some of Mr. Romney’s answers — in particular, his admissions about the need for a voucher system for Medicare — would deepen the concern in some communities about Mr. Romney’s policies.

“He was unable and unwilling to explain the math behind his $5 trillion tax cut favoring the wealthy, refused to say what rules he’d put in place to protect consumers after repealing Wall Street reform, and didn’t offer a single idea to protect families from insurance company abuses after repealing Obamacare,” Jim Messina, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, said in a statement after the debate.

The candidates head out to the campaign trail immediately, where Mr. Romney will have to find a way to turn the positive reviews from the debate into a sustained push that changes the dynamic of the race. He is expected to campaign with Representative Paul D. Ryan, his vice-presidential running mate, in Virginia on Thursday evening.

Mr. Obama has been very aggressive of late on the stump, and his scheduled events on Thursday in Denver and Madison, Wis., will give him a quick opportunity to show that energy. But some Democrats charged with helping to elect Mr. Obama in some key swing states privately expressed frustration after the debate Wednesday night that Mr. Obama’s lackluster performance made their jobs harder.

The debate was designed to be wonkish, and it did not disappoint. By giving the candidates 15 minutes — or more — to discuss each topic, the debate provided that there were plenty of long-winding answers filled with sometimes mind-numbing statistics.

It might have made the exchange boring in the eyes of voters who have come to expect short and fast-paced political combat. There were almost no “zingers” designed to embarrass the other candidate or create a bumper-sticker moment.

Those kinds of “gotcha” moments have sometimes changed the course of an election, as did Gerald Ford’s inaccurate contention that there had never been any Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Without such a moment, Wednesday’s debate may have less impact.

But the perceived imbalance between the two performances seemed certain to provide at least a temporary bump for Mr. Romney, who had been struggling to reinvigorate a somewhat faltering campaign during the past several weeks. Ahead of the debate, Mr. Romney was trailing slightly in national polls and by larger margins in some battleground states.

Republicans, declaring Mr. Romney the clear winner of the debate, predicted his performance would help him win the election in just over a month.

Democratic strategists for Mr. Obama’s campaign were forced to acknowledge Mr. Romney’s aggressive performance. Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager for Mr. Obama’s campaign, said on CNN that Mr. Romney “scores points on style.”
Multimedia
2012 Presidential Debate
Interactive Feature: Domestic Policy

Follow along with this interactive replay of the presidential debate, using fact checks and graphics to take a closer look at President Obama and Mitt Romney’s assertions and attacks.

The Caucus: Updates and Analysis From the Debate

Video: Denver Debate Highlights
Slide Show: Obama and Romney Debate in Denver
Interactive Feature: Will You Smile or Cringe? It Depends
Interactive Feature: What Romney and Obama’s Body Language Says to Voters

Related

Obama and Romney, in First Debate, Spar Over Fixing the Economy (October 4, 2012)
News Analysis: A Clash of Philosophies (October 4, 2012)
FiveThirtyEight: Polls Show a Strong Debate for Romney (October 4, 2012)
Check Point: Taking Stock of Some of the Claims and Counterclaims (October 4, 2012)

Related in Opinion

Campaign Stops: Debating Points (October 3, 2012)
Gail Collins: The Season of Debates (October 3, 2012)
Frank Bruni’s Blog: Mitt’s Feathered Debate (October 3, 2012)

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David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser who ran Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign, said that the president did not bring up some of the attacks that the campaign has made in television ads. He said the “mission tonight was not for zingers.”

Ms. Cutter insisted that Mr. Romney did not fundamentally alter the dynamics of the campaign.

“Mitt Romney needed to come in here tonight, not just to win this debate, which challengers normally do, let’s face it,” Ms. Cutter said on CNN. “He needed to change the entire dynamic of this race. He didn’t. He didn’t do that because he doubled down on the same policies that have dogged him for the last 18 months.”

Even Democratic pollsters said that focus groups they convened during the debate were impressed by Mr. Romney and somewhat surprised by Mr. Obama’s lack of an aggressive performance. In a memo released Thursday morning, the Democratic polling firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner concluded that Mr. Romney had a good night.

“The dial testing and follow-up discussions showed Mitt Romney performing well, improving his personal appeal and a number of important attributes,” the firm concluded. “Obama also impressed the group, but not to the same degree as Romney. However, the research does not suggest that Romney fundamentally changed the political calculus in this election.”

Both campaigns quickly used the debate to try to raise money for the last month of the race.

In an e-mail sent just after 1 a.m. on the East Coast, Mr. Obama wrote to his supporters: “I hope I made you proud out there explaining the vision we share for this country. Now we need to go win this election — the most important thing that will happen tonight is what you do (or don’t do) to help in the little time we have left.”

Earlier in the evening, Mr. Ryan and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, both sent e-mails seeking donations for Mr. Romney’s campaign.

“After watching tonight’s debate, the choice this November could not be clearer,” Mr. Rubio said. “A vote for Barack Obama is a vote for four more years of economic stagnation and weak foreign policy; as well as higher taxes, debt, and health care costs.”

And by Thursday morning, the campaigns and their allies at the Democratic and Republican National Committees had both produced YouTube videos that they hoped would help spread their message about the debate online.

Mr. Obama’s campaign released a video called “Mostly Fiction,” in which it accuses Mr. Romney of playing “fast and loose” with the truth during the debate.

“The sharpest observers saw beyond Romney’s ‘zingers’ and witnessed him looking in the eye of those he expects to elect him and tell outright lies about his record on several occasions — at least 12 times,” the campaign said in a news release that accompanied the video.

Republicans produced one called “Smirk,” which showed Mr. Obama’s reaction during much of the debate. In the video, the president is shown looking down with a grimace on his face, or smirking while Mr. Romney talks about the failures of Mr. Obama’s administration.

In the Democratic video, called “What a Guy,” the Democratic committee shows Mr. Romney running roughshod over the moderator of the debate, Jim Lehrer, at several points.

Presidential debate: Two candidates on stage, two different ones on campaign trail
By Dan Balz,
October 4, 2012

DENVER — Wednesday’s presidential debate was a tale of four candidates: the two men who stood on the stage for 90 minutes and the two rivals Americans have seen for months on the campaign trail and in television commercials. There was no comparison.

Start with President Obama, who may have lost Wednesday’s debate in as lopsided a manner as any incumbent in recent times. Other incumbents have stumbled in their first reelection campaign debates. Ronald Reagan in 1984 and George W. Bush in 2004 come to mind. Both had bad moments that cost them the debate.

Obama didn’t lose because he had a few bad moments. Challenger Mitt Romney dictated both the tone and the tempo of the evening, at times acting as candidate and moderator. Obama fell behind in the opening minutes and never really found his footing. He lacked energy stylistically and he lacked crispness substantively. He sounded like he does in his press conferences, at times discursive and often giving answers that were longer than necessary.

This wasn’t the Obama seen in Obama campaign commercials or in the daily scrum with Romney’s campaign. His team has waged an extraordinarily aggressive campaign from the moment Romney wrapped up the Republican nomination.

Given his vulnerability due to the state of the economy, Obama and his advisers sought to define Romney before Romney could define himself. It seemed to work. The campaign attacked Romney for his work at Bain Capital, for not releasing his tax returns, for putting money in a Swiss bank account and in the Cayman Islands.

Obama mentioned none of that on Wednesday night. It was as if he left his campaign’s best attack lines in a folder backstage. Inexplicably, he never once mentioned Romney’s “47 percent” comment — his line that nearly half of all Americans pay no federal income taxes, that they see themselves as victims, that they’re dependent on government and unwilling to take personal control of their own lives.

If none of those were worth talking about on Wednesday night, why has Obama’s campaign spent the last four months and hundreds of millions of dollars driving home that message? Perhaps his advisers believe they’ve done all the damage they need do with those attacks. There is evidence that they’ve stuck. Perhaps the president did not want to project a persona that conflicts with the candidate who captivated the country with a message of hope and inspiration four years ago.

Whatever the case, his performance left Democrats wondering what happened. As one Democratic strategist put it in an e-mail message Thursday morning, “ughhh.”

Tad Devine, another Democratic strategist, who was one of Kerry’s senior advisers in 2004, sent an e-mail with this assessment of the president’s apparent strategy Wednesday night: “I assume they had a strategy not to engage or get too personal. He [Obama] was like he had been in many previous debates, but in these very different times, cool and calm is not as powerful as it once was. They have to recalibrate or risk being pushed aside by the new and improved Romney.”

Romney, too, seemed disconnected from the candidate Americans have seen over the past year. On the campaign trail, he is awkward. He is corny and wonky. His stump speech neither soars nor strikes home with real force. Only in debates did he shine during the primaries ,and on Wednesday night he was back on comfortable ground. He knew his brief and he seemed happy to be able to deliver it face to face with the president.

Romney did what he wasn’t fully able to do at his convention, which was to make the debate as much about the president’s record as possible while giving viewers a better sense of what he would do as president to get the economy moving.

Stevens has argued for many months that Obama’s failure to take ownership of his record would prove to be his biggest obstacle to reelection. He said the debate proved that. “I don’t think [Obama] had a particularly bad debate,” he said. “He has a bad record.”

Stevens said polls show a virtual tie nationally and noted that challengers often don’t overtake an incumbent until the very end of the election. Obama advisers stressed that Romney still has a narrow path through the battleground states to win the necessary 270 electoral votes and seemed determined to make that part of whatever new narrative comes out of Wednesday’s debate.

Democrats were sobered by the president’s performance but believe fundamentals still work in Obama’s favor. Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said Romney’s victory was “convincing, but hardly changed the race.” He argued that Romney’s performance likely would bring some Republican-leaning independents who had been wavering or tilted toward Obama into the former governor’s column, but said underlying forces would still help the president.

“That said,” he added, “I think the president will have to be much more passionate about the changes he will bring, and bolder. In our dial tests, his best scores were right at the beginning when he laid out four things he would do. People are still looking for what the candidates will do. Obama will have to show much more.”

Devine said the effect of the debate is to take away hopes among Democrats that Obama might score a big victory in November and help other Democrats in down-ballot races. “That huge opening may now be lost if Romney makes up ground or, even worse, if it looks like he will win,” he said. “People want progress and to turn the page after 11 years of doubt, and last night Romney looked more like the guy who could and would turn that page for them.”

“Romney is a top-notch debater and the president had an off night,” said Steve Rosenthal, a Democratic strategist with ties to organized labor. “Debates are like speed bumps — you have to slow down to get past them but then you can resume your normal cruising speed. The public is evenly divided and this is going to be a race to the end. Now it’s onto the next one, but hopefully last night was a wake-up call to anybody on our side who had grown overconfident or complacent.”

It will take some days for the impact of the debate to filter through the electorate. Only then will it become clear whether or how much Wednesday’s debate changed things. But for the moment, Romney far exceeded expectations, and for now that has made this a different contest.

Jim Lehrer Debate Moderating Performance Savaged
The Huffington Post | By Jack Mirkinson
10/03/2012

"I'm not going to say I've done a poor job..."

That was Jim Lehrer's assessment of his performance as the moderator of the first presidential debate of the 2012 election. Sadly for him, many disagreed.

It was Lehrer's 12th time moderating, but he was largely unsuccessful in his attempts to corral the candidates. Both President Obama and Mitt Romney rolled right over him as, with increasing plaintiveness, he tried to get them to stop talking. "No, no, no," he said to Romney at one point. Romney didn't listen.

By the end of the debate, Obama and Romney had taken so much free time that Lehrer had to inform them that they would not get to one of the 15-minute segments he had intended to moderate.

The reviews on Twitter were scathing. Conservative columnist John Podhoretz called Lehrer possibly "the worst moderator in the history of moderation." Even the normally mild-mannered Al Roker took a shot at Lehrer.

"I hope Jim Lehrer gets the license plate of the truck that drove over him in this debate," he tweeted.

It wasn't long before Lehrer got his own parody Twitter feed, "Silent Jim Lehrer":

The reviews on television were little better.

"I personally do not know who won this debate," Rachel Maddow said on MSNBC. "I do believe that we saw this debate format die a very painful death on camera tonight ... the format and, I think, the moderator, honestly, with all due respect to Jim Lehrer."

Fox News' Chris Wallace said that Lehrer "seemed to lose control" of the proceedings.

Lehrer's questions, which all asked the candidates if they thought there were "differences" between their views on broad policy topics, also came in for criticism.

"Crazy that Lehrer thinks any of these answers will come in under 15 mins given how broad the questions are," MSNBC's Alex Wagner tweeted.

Lehrer did have his defenders. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple wrote that he had moderated an excellent debate:

He also gets points off among the commentariat for allowing himself to be steamrolled by the candidates. Okay, so the guy fails in a test of wills against two men who are putatively the most strong-willed people in the country.

Lerher’s real problem was that, for one night, he hads to play stand-in for the entire American media. And if there’s one thing the American public enjoys, it’s bashing the American media, no matter how it performs.

Jim Lehrer can't be blamed for it. He let Obama have his way when Obama wanted it.

Obama didn't call Romney out, it's not the moderator's job to do it for him (I actually think they should avoid inserting their own editorializing into it).

We won.