A Very Poor Performance
Well, Obama totally wasted a chance to put Romney away tonight.
I didn't want to join the endless people pontificating about what Obama needed to do in the debate, but if I could have said something to him, it was this: Romney is going to lie in your face, over and over again. If you hadn't figured that out already, he gave it away when he spent the last couple of weeks talking about how you were going to lie to him. The sole thing you need to figure out is how to call him on his endless lies and dodges without seeming angry or belligerent.
Instead, Obama let Romney walk all over him and the pathetic moderator. He's damned lucky that Romney is such a worthless candidate, or the election would have been over tonight.
Now, here is what disturbs me and makes me a little angry too. What I saw there was not a weak debate performance. It was the old Obama- a man who, after enduring savage attacks by Republicans for four years, refuses to let himself accept the fact that they are not acting in good faith.
In his own way, Obama is hanging on to a delusion every bit as great as the birthers. The intransigence and dishonesty of the Republican party in the last couple of decades has inflicted a thousand times as much damage on the country as Al Qaida. It is the greatest threat to our continued survival as a decent place for ordinary people, and we cannot have a President who is living in such a dream world that he cannot admit that to himself.
Update: just to rub it in: In the CBS News post debate poll, 56% say their opinion of Romney has changed for the better. Just 13% say that about the President. I cannot imagine a worse result for Obama than letting this entitled jerk rehabilitate himself with the American people. That's just what his people wanted out of this debate, and they got it. I am afraid that polls by Sunday or Monday will show that Obama, through his intransigent refusal to accept who he is fighting and what the stakes are, will have frittered away his entire lead, and possibly all of our futures.
I didn't want to join the endless people pontificating about what Obama needed to do in the debate, but if I could have said something to him, it was this: Romney is going to lie in your face, over and over again. If you hadn't figured that out already, he gave it away when he spent the last couple of weeks talking about how you were going to lie to him. The sole thing you need to figure out is how to call him on his endless lies and dodges without seeming angry or belligerent.
Instead, Obama let Romney walk all over him and the pathetic moderator. He's damned lucky that Romney is such a worthless candidate, or the election would have been over tonight.
Now, here is what disturbs me and makes me a little angry too. What I saw there was not a weak debate performance. It was the old Obama- a man who, after enduring savage attacks by Republicans for four years, refuses to let himself accept the fact that they are not acting in good faith.
In his own way, Obama is hanging on to a delusion every bit as great as the birthers. The intransigence and dishonesty of the Republican party in the last couple of decades has inflicted a thousand times as much damage on the country as Al Qaida. It is the greatest threat to our continued survival as a decent place for ordinary people, and we cannot have a President who is living in such a dream world that he cannot admit that to himself.
Update: just to rub it in: In the CBS News post debate poll, 56% say their opinion of Romney has changed for the better. Just 13% say that about the President. I cannot imagine a worse result for Obama than letting this entitled jerk rehabilitate himself with the American people. That's just what his people wanted out of this debate, and they got it. I am afraid that polls by Sunday or Monday will show that Obama, through his intransigent refusal to accept who he is fighting and what the stakes are, will have frittered away his entire lead, and possibly all of our futures.
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