“I didn’t see the humiliating defeat for President Obama that some liberals saw as they began their bellyaching about how President Obama has lost his momentum and could now lose the election.
I saw a serious, substantive policy debate in which neither candidate slipped up or neither candidate delivered a knockout punch. I saw a match that basically ended in a draw.”
True there was no knockout punch. Nor should there be, even in the “Dancing With the Stars” world we live in. No other aspect of what this guy says is true. Just because a liberal jerk “doesn’t see” something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. A goodly number of “Romney sucks” memes were nicely destroyed. Just like the “War on Women” and the “he’ll prohibit abortion” things got smashed, Romney came off as a much more caring and insightful individual than has been so relentlessly obscured with the endless “murder”, “felon” “tax evader” crap. Those gambits if you’ll recall, also fell by the wayside. He came across as a serious candidate with intelligent things to say. Forgetting the conservative shortcomings we all know about, I believe this was perhaps the first introduction to Romney that many, many undecideds ever experienced. And he spoke of the Constitution and Declaration and he deftly conflated those documents with freedoms and real opportunity. This is different than trying to force vague Marxist ideals into conjunction with utopian memes like 0bama is always doing.
And in that same vein, 0bama came off as a petulant, pouting, and poorly prepared chanter of the same old “millionaires and billionaires” lines we’ve been hearing for years now. Yes, years. All without any apparent improvement in the the lives of the 99%. And I believe the willingness to open up to Romney was created, and THAT may well be the knockout. Not a punch, but an opening door. This has been Mitt’s pattern, and I can’t think of another way to get through the bumper-stickerisms of the lib side, I really can’t. I remain, like all here, less than comfortable with Mitts’ many shortcomings and policy flips. There is nothing I can do about those characteristics. I’m not confident that he will do everything he said he will do. If that makes him a liar, well, OK. But I am perfectly sure that 0bama will do a LOT more than what he promised in terms of how he will create fiat policies and diktats that will negatively affect all our lives. And I’m as sure as the sun rises that he must be defeated.
Finally, neither candidate engaged in that much of a serious, substantive conversation. Compared to a bumper sticker, OK, yeah. But the fact of the matter is that Romney and Ryan have little in the way of a math-functional approach to developing a balanced budget. But whatever they have or don’t have it’s light years closer than anything 0bama has to offer.
Like him or not, in terms of executive leadership Mitt Romney is probably one of the most competent and effective men ever to run for the White House. I'm not a huge fan of the guy, but after having dealt with a number of people at the executive level in U.S. corporations over the last couple of years I was not surprised at what I saw from Mitt Romney last night. This is the way CEOs operate, and many of them have a number of common traits that serve them well and were put on full display by Romney in that one-sided "debate." These traits include: (1) an even-keeled approach to any situation, even an adversarial one; (2) a strong, powerful memory that enables them to pull facts and figures out of thin air without struggling to remember them; (3) an ability to be likeable even if the job requires a sense of detachment; and (4) a strong, almost pathological focus on keeping the best interests of an organization in mind and achieving a set of clear objectives.
As I posted several times in recent weeks, this is the kind of campaign Romney is running. The "organization" in question is his political campaign, the set of clear objectives includes a successful run for the White House, and I can guarantee you that everyone in his campaign is going to do whatever it takes to get this done even if we don't understand what they're doing and/or don't agree with their approach.