Yesterday was definitely not a debate to remember. For starters, Obama actually beat Romney as the most boring man on the stage. Granted, he didn’t win the most boring man in the room; that prize went to moderator Jim Lehrer.
The pundits are calling Romney the winner. I saw it as sort of a push. Still Romney gets points for being aggressive and outshouting the moderator and challenging Obama on… the facts? Obama looked like he was ready to go to sleep right on the stage and decided to allow Romney to get away with repeatedly misrepresenting the facts. Obama didn’t defend his positions very well at all and didn’t respond to any of the challenged Romney brought up even though ThinkProgress already knew what Romney’s challenges would be prior to the debate.
Romney did control the debate in the sense that he wouldn’t let the moderator get a word in edgewise and the moderator wouldn’t let Obama get a word in edgewise. In this sense Romney appeared to dominate the debate. I suspect he spoke for much longer than Obama did, but I haven’t looked at the numbers. It is just a suspicion.
There were a couple of moments in the debate that got my attention and they were both from Romney and in my opinion hurt Romney. One of which will haunt him past Halloween. The first was when he was critical of Obama spending a lot of money (I think it was $900 billion) on green jobs. Okay, what part of that sounds bad? The green part or the jobs part? Yeah, Obama spend money to help the environment and to create jobs. So what? I don’t get it. Aren’t the environment and jobs good things to spend money on?
Of course the second Romney gaff was his infamous man-on-Big Bird love which culminates in killing Big Bird. Yeah, Romney actually said that he loves PBS and Big Bird, but he will gut them anyway. Why will he gut Sesame Street, which has helped to educate children for nearly 40 years? He wants to do it so that he can save his billionaire friends a few extra dollars that they don’t need and aren’t going to spend. They will just stuff those extra few dollars away in a secret bank account in a foreign country to sit around not being used to educate young children.
Once again, Obama won just by letting Romney be himself. I don’t care what the pundits think; this Sesame Street line will hurt Romney far more than their opinion that Obama was boring and sleepy. Romney will probably get a small bump from this debate, but once the Big Bird ads fly, Romney’s wings will be clipped because at the end of the day, people will see that Romney values Wall Street over Sesame Street. That will be the only message remembered from this debate.
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