Mainly, it puts me in the company of the kind of chicken@#$% Liberals, who think they know it all...yet somehow magically manage to keep losing us elections.
Yet somehow, those seem to be the only kind of Liberals that are allowed to speak on matters, or allowed to be pundits on Television.
Basically, the headline I've gotten from Liberals and Obama Supporters is "Yeah, Romney lied to our collective faces, but he did it so well. Therefore, I gotta give him debate."
Seriously?
I may be the only Liberal in America who thinks Barack Obama won last night (okay, that's not fair...one of the few).
Why?
Well, first off I didn’t watch the Debate on CNN, or MSNBC...and Lord knows I didn’t watch it on Fox. I watched it on C-SPAN, a technique I picked up from beloved radio goddess, Randi Rhodes.
You watch C-SPAN only one thing happens, you see the event. You don't get spin, telling you what to think about what you just saw. You don't get pre-spin, telling you what to think about what haven't seen yet. You just get the event.
To me Debate Strategy is all about missions. The Candidates come in with a mission, something they want the tape to show the next day. Here's what the Press won't tell you, because they want you watching the debates. Candidates always succeed at accomplishing their mission. Almost always. Very rarely do they fail.
The only question is whose mission is the better campaign strategy over the long haul.
Romney’s mission was to go on the attack, be more aggressive and get in the face of the President. Well, mission accomplished. Then again, he had to do that. Everyone knew he was going to do that.
The President’s mission was to look...well...Presidential. Mission accomplished as well.
But the President had a second mission as well. He wanted to get Mitt Romney on tape shape-shifting. He wanted him flip-flopping one of his “severely conservative” positions. I think the President thought it was going to take all night to get him to do that.
Instead it happened in the first answer of the night, when Mitt Romney ditched his Tax Plan, right there on Live Television.
The Pundits saw a President who “didn’t want to be there” last night. I saw a President, with his jaw-dropping after Mitt gave his first answer, and all but looking at the camera and saying: “Uhhh, did you get that? Is that on tape? Are we good?”
Josh Marshall over at TPM put it another way:
Romney’s focus though came at the cost of a few key things.
He basically tossed aside his own tax plan or said he would if his numbers didn’t add up. But then he insisted that he could find enough loopholes to close to afford a $5 trillion tax cut for upper income earners. These are more numbers on the table. That’s really what most of the debate was about — budget numbers. Romney insisted with a straight face that up was down.
The Obama team isn’t going to try to get into a fight about whether their guy was on his game. There’s no point. (This is what I meant a couple days ago when I said Obama is not a great debater. Not a great night. But I’ve never seen him great at debating.) What I fully expect, what they’ll do if they’re smart is go full court press on Romney’s numbers and press for details about his budget plan.
The numbers simply don’t add up. Over a few news cycles that can build up really fast. He says he’ll push massive upper income tax cuts and those have to come at the cost of much higher deficits or big tax hikes for middle income people. His campaign agenda is based on a massive deception.
That’s the vulnerability Romney brings out of this debate. And it may be bigger than people realize.
My fellow Liberals can twist themselves into all the knots they want. Romney @#$%ed up tonight, severely.
He has promised across the board Tax Cuts of 20%. These will cost us $5 Trillion dollars. He can deny it all he wants, but those are just facts.
He’s promised to reduce the deficit with spending cuts, spending cuts he won’t specify.
And he went back on ALL of that last night, onstage. He said his tax cuts won’t hurt the deficit, and later promised he won’t enact them if they do. He said he won’t touch Defense Spending, as well as calling any notion of a $2 Trillion defense spending hike a lie. He also said he won’t touch Education spending, saying that the states should do more...and promising that the Federal Government will help if needed.
He was saying these things sometimes within the same answer.
Oh, and he out and out lied about his Health Care Plan covering pre-exisiting conditions. His own surrogate, the legendary Eric Fehrnstrom said Governor Romney's plan wouldn't do that.
As my Father, who was watching the same C-SPAN feed I was, texted me: if we keep having debates, Romney won’t be left with anything to cut.
The President did not lose last night. It’s hard to lose a debate when the other guy is lying to America’s face, and doing so...so blatantly that its hard to believe.
The only way the President loses this debate is if we don’t see ads in the next 48 hours showing Mitt Romney from the debate contradicting the Mitt Romney from the campaign trail. The only way the President loses this debate is if he doesn’t remind America, with both Ads and on the stump just how badly Mitt Romney lied to their face.
Just watch, because it's coming.
The only way the President loses this election is if Liberals keep whining, and talk themselves out of a victory. Unfortunately, that can still happen.
UPDATE: 10:29am Pacific Time: Guess what? Obama has his first ad out. That only took what? Twelve hours?
