Good thing you don’t pay my wages then I guess. Since you don’t affect my life one way or the other, I can safely say I could care less what you think of me personally. The sun will probably still come up in the morning.
How does giving an answer that does not address the question differ from a prepared speech? Well for on thing, Reagan actually made sense.
We should go back to the old style debates where the commentator would ask a specific question and the candidate would answer with a prepared statement that had absolutely nothing to do with the question asked. Those were the good old days.
You were caught in a significant misspeak that wasn’t even topical or comparable (like might be a reference to a heart-on-his-sleeve spontaneous Q&A by the Gipper, if such a thing existed — I think it would have been out of character for the man who would have attended to such an occasion as much as he attended to the “die-ins” on Washington DC sidewalks) so instead of saying “my bad” and going on, you make a great deal to me about how you supposedly don’t care.
Knee-deep, knee-deep, knee-deep. Don’t compare your lily pad to a throne.
Now a campaign speech by Bachmann might be interesting to analyze. That would reveal far more about her policy intentions than any peppering by paparazzi. But she’s only declared a few days ago, no?
We can pretty well bet that whoever wins the GOP nomination will mercilessly Carterize Obama over and over... “there you go again” with some smallminded, wrongheaded Rat/Kenyan idea that has been proven only to fail. Even Mitt (cough) would be up to that, because he firmly opposes any Romney/Obama Care program of national scope and would probably voice a belief that Massachusetts has a right to change its health care system if it wants. Some speculate that Obama will yet withdraw from the race and let some other Rat step up to that plate.