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I have always found Obama strangely inarticulate when speaking extemporaneously… always hemming and hawing, er…uh…y’know, er…uh. So I’m surprised he did as well as he did without the teleprompter.
Will this change the way people vote? I doubt it… it would if both were running for a first term… if that were the case Obama would be toast today… However, Obama has been there for four years and as Joe Biden said, “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive” and all Romney is, is talk. So Mr. Hope and Change will probably live to fight another day.
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Well, he could have endorsed Romney, I suppose.
Er…I think he did.
Hah! You made me laugh…
Obama should have endorsed Romney. It would have been the ultimate in bipartisanship.
Back in 2008, I thought that the “messiah” Obama was a fraud and frankly expected him to be much worse than he has actually turned out. Instead he has turned out to be some sort of “un-sinister”, centrist, Richard M. Nixon. The US presidency and (alas) the USA itself is so karma laden by now, that I don’t expect much better than Obama these days. Certainly Romney would be much, much worse.
I’m half way though the monumental Morris biography of Teddy Roosevelt and you could weep to see how far downhill the presidency has come from back then.
O has never been a particularly articulate off-the-cuff speaker. Note your own acknowledgment of the “hems and haws.”
The larger story here is that he basically “agreed with Romney” on many issues. Particularly, Social Security and tax “reform.” For Pete’s sake, he couldn’t say much, for fear that the “brain dead low information voters” that he’s trying to woo, would figure out that he endorses Bowles-Simpson’s austerity measures.
The truth is, he delivered an excellent speech “brilliantly,” once. End of story.
(And BTW, I’m not belittling his remarks to the Dem Convention two cycles, ago. I was absolutely smitten by it. Must have played the video of it at least five or six times.)
Blue
I think Romney is going to turn his etch-a-sketch weakness into a strength.
The Obama team knows they lost this one, so they will review the plays, the points, the moves. They will drill Obama and devise strategies to beat those plays, points and moves.
He will be prepared for this Romney next time.
But a different Romney will show up next time, leaving his carefully drilled strategies with no target. He will stand there um-ing and aaaand-ing like a baffled fool while Romney talks about how he is really in favor of a woman’s right to choose and will fight to protect the gains realized through Romneycare.
http://blogs.ft.com/the-world/2012/10/gutterball-blues-obama-centrists-deflated-by-debate/
Al-mar-rica, Al-mar-rica, Gott shed his grace und zee.
I can see the coming political cartoon, Zero dressed as a waiter serving Roast Big Bird to a voracious Mittens.
Zero’s campaign slogans through the years, Hope And Change-Forward-I Could Have Been Worse!
Romney much worse, I don’t think so.
Foreign policy (i.e., U.S. militarism and corporate globalist imperialism), no difference despite Romney’s macho talk. That’s just lies for the yokels. Imperialist policy is pretty much set (and it is set by forces above and distinct from the President): support Israel no matter what, control the oil, and keep killing off outposts of economic sovereignty.
Domestic policy (i.e., permanent austerity, shovel money up to the rich and the banks and the rich, and gradually doing away with the remnants of the New Deal and Great Society): no difference except _now_ Obama is bleating about the Bush tax cuts that _Obama_ extended. Romney, if he takes office and tries to cut Social Security and Medicare, will probably have to compromise and not get everything he claims to want on the first try. Just like would happen if Obama gets re-elected.
Okay, there is other important stuff, identity politics and religious stuff, but even there I see much of Romney’s rightist pronouncements as Johnny-come-lately posing for the religious and tea party righties that make up too much of the Repub party. After the election he’ll likely move toward the Obama-esque corporate right ‘politically correct’ policy and thinking that he’s comfortable with. He won’t have his heart in tea party crusades and similar b.s., and that will show fairly quickly. IMHO.
Really it comes down to the clientele each party has… let me quote from that FT blog again:
That includes union membership, women, people of color etc. Of course there is a difference… The USA is supposed to be a young country, but in fact it has one of the world’s oldest, if not the oldest, unchanged regime… schlepping hundreds of years of that karma going back to colonial times… Maybe what might be wonderfully American is that at this late date, you still imagine something else might be on the menu.
Like the lady in the blog says, in some modest way, the Democrats are still in touch with something that resembles the day to day reality of the majority of Americans and the Republicans no longer are.
I think you confuse “being in touch with” with ‘playing to.”
There’s a big difference.
It would be great if there were… you might say the Republicans are more “sincere”.
The best example of courting the voters and making True Believers of them, but not delivering on campaign pledges (leaving aside OBomba, of course) was Ronald Reagan.
He promised the fundie Christians the World, and gave them…nothing in the end. They’re still so blinded by His Divine Light, even today they don’t get they got played.
Hell, OBomba’s given the religious more, slid in plenty of faith-based initiatives.
WIll have to get Teddy’s biography. Fromr 4fiews I have read, and your endorsement, it sounds like it is a good lone.
But you and I must remember a different Richard Nixon. He would never have stood for the antics of the Bernanke/Geithner Federal Reserve Crowd. He disliked the “Jewish” bankers and their control over the money industry. In fact, in the summer of 1973, he pushed for price roll backs. I know – at the time, I was an insurance underwriter who spent 15% of my time on those roll back adjustments.
Here is a transcript of the debate with Jill Stein and Rocky Anderson included. http://www.democracynow.org/seo/2012/10/4/expanding_the_debate_exclusive_third_party
..you have always found obama bla bla bla EXCEPT during the 30 or so debates he was in when he won the nomination AND the presidency.
BUT WAIT!..Obama CANT be the president because he cant get through a debate so if he ” were running for a first term… if that were the case Obama would be toast today… “…like he was after he won the election and the debates…lol
sound logic.
“Which Presidential candidate offers the better plan for closing the income gap(between the rich and poor)? Saturday, Apr 14 2012
The growing income gap between the top 1% and the other 99% is too large and is bad for America. The purpose of this post is not to discuss the myriad reasons why, but rather to focus on how the gap can be reduced, and whose plan reduces it best.
There are only two ways to reduce the gap:
A. Bring down the 1%
and/or
B. Lift the 99%
That’s it. There are no other choices.
Bottom line: Obama wants to bring down the 1% by increasing their taxes. Since all federal tax increases have the same effect – they remove dollars from the economy – the Obama plan will punish not only the 1% but also the 99%. Removing dollars from the economy will serve as an anti-stimulus, depressing the entire economy. And as is always the case, when an economy is depressed, the poor are injured more than the rich.
Romney wants to reward the 1%, under the theory that the wealthy will create jobs for the rest. He ignores the simple fact that this never has worked and never will work. The growing gap itself proves that rewarding the rich doesn’t close the gap. Reward the rich and they simply will grow richer.
In short, neither Obama nor Romney advocates solution B, lifting the 99%, and both will oversee a growing gap. Neither of them understands or cares about the facts of Monetary Sovereignty, which understanding would help reduce income inequality.
As for Romney and Obama, don’t let them deceive you. Both their plans will widen the gap.” from
http://rodgermmitchell.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/which-presidential-candidate-offers-the-better-plan-for-closing-the-income-gap/
Some more on Nixon.
“To hear Republicans on the campaign trail, the United States could not have elected a more left-wing president than Barack Obama, one more hostile to business or more eager to expand government power. Left-wing Democrats, I’m sure, would disagree. If they had their druthers, they would probably make a more liberal, more pro-big government choice. Somebody, perhaps, like Richard Nixon.
That’s right. The Nixon administration not only supported the Clean Air Act and affirmative action, it also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency, one of the agencies the business community most detests, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to police working conditions. Herbert Stein, chief economic adviser during the administrations of Nixon and Gerald Ford, once remarked: “Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal.”
Nixon bolstered Social Security benefits. He introduced a minimum tax on the wealthy and championed a guaranteed minimum income for the poor. He even proposed health reform that would require employers to buy health insurance for all their employees and subsidize those who couldn’t afford it. That failed because of Democratic opposition. Today, Republicans would probably shoot it down.
So compare the achievements of Obama with those of Nixon (by the way, I used to dislike and despise Nixon). The New York Times’ Porter pursues:
“The difference between then and now is that Nixon — like most mainstream Republicans — accepted that government had a role to play guaranteeing Americans’ economic well-being. That consensus cracked around the time of Ronald Reagan’s inaugural speech in 1981. “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem,” the president intoned. And the country’s political center set off on a long rightward migration.” from
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2012/09/05/obama-way-right-of-nixon/
Wonderful comment! “Come home Milhous, all is forgiven”. The world do turn, don’t it?
Richard Nixon murdered more men, women, and little children in SE Asia than the US Armed forces lost in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam combined. Fuck Richard Nixon. His body should have been burned in a trash can.
All true… still with him we would have health coverage… you can’t win ‘em all.
Yeah, I guess so. What’s a few million gook lives when it’s all about us, right?
LOL! Zing.
And in turn, Romney could have endorsed Obama, after which they could have shared a manly hug of camaraderie and then, wiping tears of joy from their eyes, walked off into the beautiful and glowing sunset of Fascism together.
Holding hands, of course.
“The next President will have the power to nominate Supreme Court justices, and following the current trend, the President probably will appoint youngish people, who, long after the President leaves office, will continue to rule for many years.”
and
“Today, the Court is almost, but not quite, evenly divided between the right wing and the left wing. Though the Constitution makes no such distinction, the readers and interpreters of the Constitution do.
Both the right and the left claim to believe in “freedom.” The right wing leans toward the moneyed class and its belief in freedom from government interference in its finances, along with male domination and religious absolutism.
The left wing leans toward empathy with the less powerful and their desire for freedom from government interference in personal matters, human equality, and freedom from religious absolutism and domination by the moneyed class. ” from
http://rodgermmitchell.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/the-coming-election-presidents-come-and-go-but-the-supreme-court-is-forever/