Don’t Be Fooled, That Debate Was a Big Deal

Mitt Romney beat the britches off of President Obama in their first debate, including the devastating sound bite “you’ve been president for four years.”

It was the most-watched debate in 20 years and was the most decisive victory by a challenger in at least that long, but to look at the news today, you might be tempted to think it really didn’t matter.

Another month of essentially flat job growth is being trumpeted as just the comeback the president needed, with reporters, addicted to the top-line unemployment rate, freaking out about the fact that the measure fell below 8 percent.

(Power Play will spare you another lecture on the irrelevancy of this measure in a stagnant economy. The number to watch to know how people are really doing is the larger measure of those unemployed, underemployed and those who have given up work, which held steady at 14.7 percent.)

Certainly the very presence of an avalanche of favorable, if misleading, economic headlines will give the president a boost. And he certainly needs one given his botch on Wednesday.

The most effective spin from Team Obama so far has been that this kind of thing happens all the time – that incumbents always have trouble in their first debates. Why, just look at Ronald Reagan in 1984 and George W. Bush in 2004, they were off their game, came back and won.

While the long-term spin from Obama and his campaign is that Romney is a liar and a phony who only won by taking advantage of an incumbent too tirelessly committed to honest politics and detailed answers, the most urgent matter is to get the establishment press to minimize the importance of the president’s loss...

Mitt Romney beat the britches off of President Obama

Aw come on! Romney cheated!

Romney was talking in a foreign language.. all that stuff about what is right with America, our inalienable rights and how to save Her from the current crises. You gotta be kidding.

Hey! that's a foreign language to the Obamas. Say what? You gotta be kidding. What's right with America? Huh? Save America? Fix the b**** or forget her, man. Speak the Obamas' language!

Romney didn't speak their language.

Make it fair next time. Make the debate about what is wrong with America.

I've seen those old videos.. Obama really shines hurling insults and threats against America.

I didn’t watch the debate but some friends who are diehard lefties did. When asked, my friend said that she thought Obama won because it was obvious that Romney was lying - everybody knew he was lying and they were just disappointed that Lehr neither maintained order or bothered to comment at patently false, over the top lies that the couple were stunned to keep hearing throughout the debate.

At work, some lefties said in amazed tones that they were shocked by Obama’s behavior. They said he looked at the floor and wouldn’t look at Romney - that he behaved like a shamed school boy facing the principal in the school’s office.

So articles like this one are interesting...very interesting...

Somehow I ended up on a left wing mailing list of Move On. This is an email re how the left wing progressives feel about the debate:

Dear MoveOn member,

That was infuriating.

During last night’s presidential debate, Mitt Romney smirked his way through dozens of mischaracterizations, distortions, and outright lies. The moderator, Jim Lehrer, never cut him off. And now the mainstream media is saying that Mitt won the debate.

We can’t let Romney “win” the debate on a boatload of lies.

He lied about his tax plan, his deficit plan, and Medicare. He lied about what “Obamacare” would do. He lied, baldly and convincingly, about Obama’s entire presidency.1

We need to move quickly to set the record straight. Our online team worked overnight preparing a media blitz—including online ads targeted at swing-state voters—correcting the worst lies in an easy-to-share format.

Chip in $5 to get the truth out—countering Mitt’s lies.

If we don’t fight back now with the truth, some of those lies will stick, and Romney could pull ahead.

Already, Romney and his Super PAC friends have spent millions on blatantly false ads attacking President Obama for gutting work requirements for welfare and cutting $700 million from Medicare.

Last night was more of the same.

And research shows that when lies get repeated enough times people will believe them—no matter how outlandish they might seem. The only way to keep Romney honest is to make sure the facts get corrected on the spot.

We’re now in the moment when millions of undecided voters who don’t usually pay attention to politics start to focus.

This is it. This is what MoveOn’s massive online network is for. Let’s use it.

Please chip in $5.

Thanks for all you do.

–Angie, Mark, Lenore, Tate, and the rest of the team

1. “Presidential Debate Fact-Check and Updates,” The New York Times, October 3, 2012
http://www.moveon.org/r?r=281980&id=53824-21930683-_smjiTx&t=4

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