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Jonathan Tobin says Obama’s mojo picked a fine time to leave him.
The biggest difference between discussing the outcome of a sporting event and a political debate is that the outcome of the former is, or at least ought to be, objectively determined by the score while the latter is, almost by definition, a subjective judgment. Nevertheless, though debates are often muddled affairs with no clear winners or losers, some are fairly clear-cut in their impact. Wednesday night’s set-to between President Obama and Mitt Romney was one such encounter. The left-wing talkers on MSNBC, the establishment types chattering on CNN and the conservatives on Fox News all agreed Romney won hands down. But the post-debate pushback from Democrats has centered not only on disingenuous “fact checking” but on the idea that the debate either didn’t matter much or that the Republican’s superiority was a superficial effect that dissipates on closer inspection. But in this case the liberal spinners have a problem: the audience.
It turns out ratings for this debate went through the roof. The Nielson ratings agency reports that 67.2 million Americans watched the debate on television at home. That’s the second highest audience for such a debate in history (number one was the first debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter in 1980). And that doesn’t count those who either watched it in airports, hotels, bars or other venues or the many millions who watched it on their computers, tablets or phones. In other words, the president picked the wrong night to mail in his performance. …
John Podhoretz says it was not a bad night for Obama, but an indefensible bad four years.
This week’s “Saturday Night Live” had a sketch portraying “Day 3″ of MSNBC’s coverage of “the worst thing that has ever happened anywhere”—the debate on Wednesday night. This brilliant bit of parody (no, my wife doesn’t work there any longer, so this does not require a disclaimer) captured one of the strangest aspects of the liberal response to Barack Obama’s performance: The masochistic insistence on going over and over and over just how bad and awful and terrible Obama was.
But was Obama really that terrible? The argument he was rests on the presumption that he failed to make his case and failed to call Romney out. He did fail at those, but as Yuval Levin argues in today’s must-read blog post, that may be due more to the fact that he doesn’t have a case to make and can’t call Romney out so easily; he’s spent the year running against a caricature of Mitt Romney, not on the grounds that he has a positive agenda for a second term. Romney did not let Obama’s distorted descriptions of his policies go unchallenged, and Obama’s inability to come back at Romney is in part the result that all Obama has are allegations, not substantial criticisms.
There’s a reason why Democrats, liberals, and Obama camp followers are concentrating on the debate. They want to isolate it, scapegoat it, and push it over the cliff. They want to say it was a bad night, an off night, a misfire, a lousy game…because anybody can have one of those. …
Washington Post interviews Jim Lehrer.
Jim Lehrer has a few words in response to those who thought he let President Obama and Mitt Romney ramble on and roll over him in Wednesday’s presidential debate:
“So what?”
The veteran PBS newsman, who was persuaded by the Presidential Debate Commission to moderate his 12th debate — the last one he’ll do, he vows — says the event wasn’t about “control” or the strict enforcement of rules. It was about producing a sharp discussion and substantive contrast between the candidates. Besides, he says, few people seemed to understand that the new format, which divided the discussion into 15 minute segments, was supposed to encourage such exchanges.
In this edited transcript of a phone conversation Friday morning, Lehrer, 78, lays out his thoughts about what went down in Denver the other night.
Question: What was your overall impression of the debate?
Answer: Well, there was a new format, [that has] never been tried before. People have always said what we really ought to have is a more open exchange among the candidates, keep moderators out of it and let the candidates really talk to each other. Well, this was a step toward doing that. And I felt that from that point of view it certainly worked.
Q: Were there drawbacks to it?
A: I had wanted to cover a lot more ground in terms of subjects. …
American Thinker says it’s the sycophantic media that ruined the president.
It’s not an “Incumbent Curse,” as MSNBC would call Obama’s performance at Wednesday’s first presidential debate. It was not Obama’s fear of coming across as the angry black man, as Michael Eric Dyson surmised, that prevented Obama from driving a strong debate on the issues with Mitt Romney. And it was not that Mitt Romney has been practicing since June for the debates, per David Axelrod’s analysis. Nor was it a question of Obama losing the debate stylistically rather than substantively. And certainly it was not that Mitt Romney was untruthful, thereby catching Obama off-guard. The fact is that this Obama we saw Wednesday night and have endured for the last four years is a product of our liberal leftist media.
Obama was not ready Wednesday, he has never been ready, and he will never be ready to be the leader this country needs, for he is the first president to have never been vetted.
My own mother observed that “it’s the media’s fault that Obama lost the debate. Watching the debate reminded me of a child set out on his own after being raised by parents who failed to teach him responsibility and accountability and let the child think that he was above being corrected or disciplined. This was the time that Chris Matthews could not jump in and tell the people what Obama meant to say.” Indeed, Obama has been brought up by an adoring and overindulgent liberal media who have coddled him for the last eight years on everything from his appearance to Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, and his caught-on-a-live-microphone secret handshake with Russian President Medvedev, where he promised that he will have “more flexibility after the election” to work with the Russians on missile defense. Additionally, we have the age-old public displays of media affection, including Dave Brooks’ awe over the crease in Obama’s pants and the “thrill up” Chris Matthews’ leg. With a sycophantic media like this, who needs accountability? …
James Warren in the Daily Beast interviewed Bill Daley, former Obama chief of staff, pushed out by Valerie Jarrett.
… “What seems to be a victory in optics for Romney may create an opportunity for those people to take a second look. Looking at the polling going into the debate, he needed that,” said Daley, who oversaw Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign against George W. Bush.
“Opinion is that he had an extremely good night, and that is a big advantage,” said Daley. “That’s big for a guy on the ropes, now perhaps back with solid legs in the ring. Whether that now turns into a fundamental beginning of a reshape of the campaign is unknown.”
At least two current Obama campaign aides were more blunt than Daley and used the term “shell-shocked” over the Obama performance. There were various analyses of what went wrong, including finger-pointing at debate preparations. Those included claims that Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who played the role of Romney in mock debates, probably wasn’t tough and aggressive enough. (“He does, after all, want to be Secretary of State,” claimed one aide.)
Partly lost in the fray was Obama’s history as a good but not necessarily great debater with a style at times nonchalant and diffident. …
Toby Harnden with an astonishing revelation. President Clueless thought he’d won the debate.
When President Barack Obama stepped off the stage in Denver last week the 60 million Americans watching the debate against Mitt Romney already knew it had been a disaster for him.
But what nobody knew, until now, was that Obama believed he had actually won.
In an extraordinary insight into the events leading up to the 90 minute showdown which changed the face of the election, a Democrat close to the Obama campaign today reveals that the President also did not take his debate preparation seriously, ignored the advice of senior aides and ignored one-liners that had been prepared to wound Romney.
The Democrat said that Obama’s inner circle was dismayed at the ‘disaster’ and that he believed the central problem was that the President was so disdainful of Romney that he didn’t believe he needed to engage with him.
‘President Obama made it clear he wanted to be doing anything else – anything – but debate prep,’ the Democrat said. ‘He kept breaking off whenever he got the opportunity and never really focused on the event. …
Wisconsin prof reacts to the University’s gift in kind to the Obama campaign.
It’s no secret that academia is largely made up of liberal Democrats. But the University of Wisconsin made it painfully obvious when President Obama came to speak at a campaign rally on campus Thursday.
“My reaction to President Obama’s visit has gone from unease, to mild irritation, to serious concern,” political science Professor Kenneth Mayer wrote in an email to university administrators. “In a very real sense, we are forcing them (students) to become participants in the campaign and express their support for the campaign.”
How? ..
Tongue in cheek, Andrew Malcolm turns a NASA photo of the Helix Nebulae into a political lesson.
… Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, or 671 million miles an hour. The Helix light moved at those speeds for 650 Earth years. (It still is, for that matter.)
In other words, this Helix light traveled 3,900 trillion miles to reach this page. We’ll find out what comes after trillion if Obama gets a second term. But suffice to say, in money or miles, it’s a very large number.
Now, why care what was going on 650 light years away and ago?
Because that’s precisely what’s going to happen much closer to home to our Sun — in about five billion years. By that time we should be whittling down Obama’s national debt, although real immigration reform will still be but one of his many promises.
When Nature finally throws the dimmer switch and our Sun begins to die over time, it won’t be George W. Bush’s fault. And it won’t even take 650 days to figure out. We’ll get the message of diminished light within less than nine minutes. …