Can the "scientific" polls be far behind?
One of the yahooiest Yahoos at Yahoo News, Jeff Greenfield, desperately tries to upright the derailed commie train. Why? He could be a commie, but more than likely it's because he has fallen to the last rung of the AmericaLast media ladder, PBS. [Yahoo is more like the subbasement.] After being discarded by ABC and CBS, he now realizes he needs government largesse to survive in his doddering old age. I call it The Big Bird Syndrome.
Obama wins the second debate. Too bad it's not the one that mattered.
When the evening
began, one observation dominated the conversation: “If President Barack
Obama has another debate like the last one, the election’s over.”
When the evening ended, I was
struck by a different thought: If Obama had performed this way at the
first debate, the election would have been over.
In every debate, whatever the
format, whatever the questions, there is one and only one way to
identify the winner: Who commands the room? Who drives the narrative?
Who is in charge? More often than not on Tuesday night, I think, Obama
had the better of it.
From a substantive view, there was one argument that the president was seeking to make over and over: Don’t let Mitt Romney fool you; he’s a rich guy out to protect the interests of the well-off, not the middle-class.
Hee-hee. Wallet envy.
That’s why he referenced not just
Romney’s tax plan, but Romney’s taxes, the fact that the Republican
presidential nominee paid a lower rate on his millions than ordinary
working-class folks do on theirs, the fact that Romney has invested
heavily in China.
And when Romney went at Obama with almost the exact same argument he
used so devastatingly against Newt Gingrich—“have you checked your
pension?”
—Obama came back with, “I haven’t looked at my pension; it’s
not as big as yours. (For super-wonks it harked back to a 1982 debate
between Mario Cuomo and the super-wealthy Lew Lehrman, when Cuomo
reached over, grabbed Lehrman’s hand, and said, “Nice watch, Lou!”)
And in talking about an area where the Obama administration has clear vulnerabilities—the attack on the American consulate in Libya—Obama summoned the inherent high ground of the presidency to condemn the “politicization” of the attack.
To be clear: There was nothing
particularly off about Romney. He had several strong moments, most
especially contrasting what Obama said he would do in 2008 with what in
fact had happened over the past four years. This was, and is, the single
most powerful argument against returning Obama to the White House, and
Romney deployed it effectively.
It’s just that Obama found what
he could not find in Denver—a coherent thread to make the case that he
understands the middle-class in a way Romney does not. For those
Democratic partisans wondering where “the 47 percent” argument was,
Obama was saving it for the close which—because of a pre-debate coin
flip—Romney could not answer. In this sense, it was like Reagan’s famous
“are you better off?” question from 1980.
In a larger sense, however,
Obama’s success is unlikely to have anything like the impact of that
1980 debate, nor will it likely alter the terrain of the campaign as the
first debate of 2012 did. Had the Obama of this debate showed up two
weeks ago, he might well have ended Romney’s effort to present himself
as a credible alternative to the president.
That opportunity vanished that
night. While it’s clear that Obama’s performance will revive the
enthusiasm of his supporters, it seems unlikely that it will cause those
impressed by Romney to reconsider. Like they say in show business,
timing is everything.
What La Greenfield really wants to say is: "Why in the world did the AmericaLast media expose Emperor Haile Unlikely as a disdainful imbecile after the first debate?"
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