Posted on 10/03/2012 10:34:35 PM PDT by Second Amendment First
DENVER - One word of advice for Barack Obama before his next debate: Caffeine.
I had a Pepsi right before the debate started Wednesday night and was tingly for the next 90 minutes.
President Obama looked like someone had slipped him an Ambien.
The first presidential debate of 2012 took place at the University of Denver and was between Obama and Mitt Romney. But only Romney showed up.
For much of the debate, it appeared as if Obama, the former professor, and not Obama, the presidential candidate, was on stage.
It’s not that Romney’s performance was perfect or polished - - it wasn’t - - it’s just that Obama’s was so mediocre.
It is possible Obama was overconfident, but I doubt it. He is not a foolish man. So I think he was just overtired or over-distracted or over-something. But he sure wasn’t over-energetic.
Maybe Jen Psaki, his traveling press secretary, was preparing us when she said on Air Force One Sunday that Obama “has had less time to prepare than we anticipated. That’s just a fact. It’s difficult to schedule significant blocks of time when you’re the president.”
Mitt Romney, by comparison, seemed bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He seemed to enjoy being there.
He was far from profound. “My priority is putting people back to work in this country,” he said.
And: “I love great schools.”
Trite? You bet. But at least he spoke in reasonably short sentences.
Obama often sounded like he was defending a doctoral dissertation. His thoughts seemed to range from lengthy to endless.
Mr. President, shorter is better. Really. We are a society with a short attention span.
Complex problems do not require complex answers. Not on TV, they don’t. Once a candidate is safely elected, he can be as long-winded as he wants in the White House and even before Congress.
But he has to get elected. And it’s a little early for Obama to fall on the ball. Which is where he seemed to spend most of the evening Wednesday.
And, by so doing, he let Romney get away with a lot.
“Mr. President, you’re entitled to your own airplane and your own house, but not to your own facts,” Romney said in one of the few zingers of the debate.
Couldn’t Obama have replied in kind? Obama could have said something like: “And you, Gov. Romney, think you’re entitled to car elevators and Swiss bank accounts!”
Too nasty? Too unpresidential? OK, you may be right.
But how does Obama get through an entire debate without referencing Romney’s infamous “47 percent” statement even once?
I didn’t expect Obama to bring up how Romney caged the family dog on the roof his car, but I thought at least Obama might bring up Romney’s refusal to release any significant number of his tax returns.
But, no, Obama took the high road. The very long high road. Here is Obama on the health care crisis. I don’t expect you to read all 190 words of it, but I will reprint them anyway.
Obama: “There are two ways of dealing with our health care crisis. One is to simply leave a whole bunch of people uninsured and let them fend for themselves, to let businesses figure out how long they can continue to pay premiums until finally they just give up, and their workers are no longer getting insured, and that’s been the trend line. Or, alternatively, we can figure out, how do we make the cost of care more effective. And there are ways of doing it. So at Cleveland Clinic, one of the best health care systems in the world, they actually provide great care cheaper than average. And the reason they do is because they do some smart things. They — they say, if a patient’s coming in, let’s get all the doctors together at once, do one test instead of having the patient run around with 10 tests. Let’s make sure that we’re providing preventive care so we’re catching the onset of something like diabetes. Let’s — let’s pay providers on the basis of performance as opposed to on the basis of how many procedures they’ve — they’ve engaged in.”
You know what? On the merits, Obama was absolutely correct in his analysis. And at least several people were still awake by the end of it.
Am I arguing for triviality and sound bites and acting dumb? Absolutely not. Obama’s goal can be to become the smartest one-term president in history.
But I think his supporters, those people who really believe in him and what he is trying to do, will be expecting a little more from him in the next face-off.
“I think this was a terrific debate,” Obama said near the end of the evening.
And it was. For Mitt Romney.
Roger Simon is POLITICO’s chief political columnist.
Yeah, this guy sounded a bit too p*ssed off and should have left this garbage for his personal twitter feed.
I just watched Special Report that I DVRed before the debate. At the end, Jonah Goldberg said, paraphrased, “Sometimes President Obama has to be reminded by his own aids he’s not that great of a speaker.†That was kind of prophetic. O walked over to Romney like he had won the debate. Not even close. Obama’s narcissism combined now with a dismal Presidential record will be his undoing.
It’s REALLY bad when Obama loses Roger Simon of Politico - the one who did that awful, supposed satirical hit piece on Paul Ryan last week.
What an absolute stinker of a debate for Obama!!
Obama talked down to people. Romney talked to them. There’s a world of difference right there.
People don’t like the smartest guy in the room. They appreciate an intelligent person but not one who thinks he knows better what’s going on than any one alive.
I think Obama is running to be President Of The Nerds. Which is an insult quite frankly speaking - to nerds like me.
Meanwhile...
The DailyKos/MediaMatters/Mainstream Media spin is:
A Complete Disaster for Romney
“Romney spewed more lies tonight than any of us could possibly list, but the journalists will be poring over them for the next week, and matching them up with Romney’s previous statements. Obama hung back and let Mitt hang himself. Mitt abandoned his platform, his campaign, his party tonight.”
The real question is which narrative will win in the next several days.
The MediaMatters.Soros spin??
Or what the sheeple saw with their own lying eyes?
obama has led a sheltered existence, with selective interviews, mainstream softballs and fluff. He’s so used to the affirmative action job he can’t adjust to real work. Maybe it was a party with the old shroom gang.
Obama’s problem was not being tired, it was being forced to defend his record with somebody who was systematically exposing every lie he told. Looking tired was just a side effect.
LOL! I'm thinking the side trip to Hoover Dam and the fundraisers may tend to suck time away from memorizing facts. I mean "debate prep".
Romney demonstrated a lot more depth than Obama. It appears that he was in up to his elbows in healthcare while he was MA governor. He knew details. And he understands finance. Obama spoke in vague generalities, like he hasn’t been involved in healthcare or the economy. He came off as a lightweight.
Ryan versus Biden should be even more of a mismatch.
They obviously decided to attack Romney, saying he "doubled-down" when he repeated what he has said before, and he "backed away" from things he previously said when it sounded like he changed something.
Attack, attack, attack. Confuse, muddle, obfuscate. Typical Dem strategy. The only confused one on the stage was Obama!
Smart ass.
;D
But he did give up that time scheduled for the daily National Security Briefings.
Hehe :-)
What's to prepare? He is the POTUS isn't he? Isn't he doing the job already? Or at least supposed to be doing the job?
I LOL’ed.
;]
Rumor has it that Biden will now be referring to his boss as “Stench”.
Just having fun back.
Zero really got his clock cleaned didnt he
Rumor has it that Biden will now be referring to his boss as “Stench”.
Actually the perfectly reasonable explanation of saving money on Obamacare at a clinic showed he doesn’t need a teleprompter, unless it is needed to cut his answers into noninformative sound bites.
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