October 22, 2012

The dynamic in political punditry today and what might end up making the difference in the Prez race

Not sure who Dee Evans is but she is right here. Republican/Conservative pundits in the US are always on message and always spinning. Pundits considered more amenable to the Democratic/Liberal side will still call a loss a loss or a failure a failure if they see it that way. Republican/Conservative pundits will always try to spin a loss by a Republican as a victory and a failure as a success. That is the dynamic in politics today.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dee-evans/media-bias-debates_b_1989561.html

It's always talked about but rarely examined, Republican reaction to a crisis and monumental disappointment versus Democratic reaction to the same. The difference was never on such wide-eyed display as in the past 2-3 weeks following the first two debates between the presidential contenders.

According to numerous polls, most people have decided that Mitt Romney won the first debate and President Obama came out on top in the second debate; but looking at the Democratic reaction to President Obama's first debate and Republican reaction to Mitt Romney's second debate is like looking at yourself in a fun house mirror. You look at yourself pre-mirror and you think you look tall, thin and beautiful until you step in front of the funhouse mirror and it tells you that you're short, fat and your nose is big.

When President Obama whiffed on the first debate (and let's be honest, it definitely was not his best showing) Liberals and Democrats (especially in the media) proceeded immediately to the nearest cliff and jumped off without so much as a net or a last cigarette. They screamed and yelled and lit their hair on fire! Watching post-debate analysis on MSNBC was like watching a rerun of Roseanne when one of her kids has done something really stupid and the only thing she feels she can do is scream at them until "she" feels better... not the kid, but her. The funny thing is that until the post-debate television commentary, I was reading the live blogs on several liberal leaning websites and none of them portrayed Obama as doing as badly as was described in the post-debate analysis. Some were commenting that Obama had some strong moments; some noted that he seemed to come alive at the end and some even called it a tie. But boy howdy, when the debate was over and the doors flung open... church was OUT! I honestly thought Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews were going to have a stroke! They ranted and raved and called Obama everything but a child of God. Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast wanted to put Obama in a basket and leave him on the doorstep of his creepiest neighbor. It seemed that all it took for Liberal America to fall out of love with Barack Obama was a bad debate. Hell, if Republicans only knew that they would have scheduled a debate for Obama in 2009.
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October 21, 2012

2nd part of 2 part debate contest. How many lies will team Ryan/Romney end up with in all 4 debates

In part two of the contest, Romney and Ryan are up to 82 lies:

- 1st Presidential debate, Romney told 27 lies
- Vice Presidential debate, Ryan told 24 lies
- 2nd Presidential debate, Romney told 31 lies

How many lies will the team of Romney and Ryan end this debate season with.

In addition to selecting a poll option below, please respond with an exact number

October 21, 2012

1st of two part contest for 3rd debate. How many seconds will there be between Romney lies

I have a two part contest for 3rd debate, In part one, how many seconds will there be between Romney lies.

In the second Presidential debate, Romney told a lie every 79 seconds. In the Vice Presidential debate, Paul Ryan told a lie every 100 seconds. In the first Presidential debate, Romney told a lie every 84 seconds.

I am in at 75 seconds between lies for Romney in the third and final debate.

In addition to selecting a poll option, please respond with an exact number.

October 15, 2012

A contest for tonight's debate! How many seconds will there be between Romney lies?

OK Friends, a contest. In the first Presidential debate, Romney told a lie every 84 seconds. In the VP debate, Ryan told a lie every 100 seconds. The contest is, guess how many seconds will there be between Romney lies tonight? I'm in at 87 seconds.

10/16 - Edited this morning to change it from 'tomorrow' to 'tonight'

October 10, 2012

The Plot Behind Mitt Romney's Debate strategy - xPost from Video & Multimedia

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101765996

?hd=1

Transcript:

Hello, my name is Steve Leser. I am a principal with Democratic Spring Strategies and a writer for Democrats for Progress and I am going to talk about the Romney strategy for the First Debate

In the several weeks long run-up to the October third debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, the Romney campaign let it slip several times that they had been practicing for this debate since at least June. I remember reading that and wondering what he could be working on for so long.

I’ll get back to that in a moment.

One of the astounding things about the October third debate is that it was a debate on domestic policy of which the economy is probably its most important component, and after the debate, we have no idea what one of the candidates would do with regards to the economy if elected.

Think about that.

If you are running in an election to become the executive of any country, state, province, county, city or village, anywhere in the world, you owe one thing to the people who may vote for you.

You owe them a fair representation of how you intend to govern. In terms of the economy, the basics for this are all the same.

Are you going to raise or lower taxes? Are you going to spend more in your term than is currently being spent? Are you going to cut spending? If you are going to lower taxes how are you going to pay for things? If you are going to raise spending how are you going to pay for the increase? If you are going to cut spending, who is going to bear the brunt of those cuts.

If you are having a debate between two or more candidates, the discussion of those specifics is a vital part of helping the people voting to decide which candidate to choose.

The candidates challenge each other regarding their respective plans and tell the American people why their plan is good and why their opponents plan is lacking.

Mitt Romney stood in front of 60 million American people, denied the plan he had been touting for 18 months and didn’t name any plan in its place.

The real loser in what happened in the first debate is the American people. After the debate, virtually all voter groups said that they didn’t receive enough specifics about the candidates’ plans. Actually, there were several specifics outlined by President Obama, including tax breaks for everyone except the wealthiest Americans. There were no specifics from Mitt Romney.

So, back to the five months of practice put in by Romney and his campaign. I thought about it for a few days after the debate. What did they practice? They certainly didn’t practice selling his economic plan because he didn’t talk about one. So what was all that practice about?

Then it hit me.

Every Presidential election year in the U.S., you have debates with a similar dynamic on the economy. The Republican nominee attacks the Democratic nominee for (in the GOP’s opinion) proposing to spend too much and tax too much, and the Democratic nominee attacks the Republican nominee for proposing to cut taxes too much increasing the deficit and for potentially needing to cut programs like Social Security and Medicare.

The public knows about these lines of attack, voters already know where they stand on those issues and thus the debate doesn’t move many people either way.

What if, however, you could make it completely one sided?

I think this is the question the Romney senior campaign staff was floating internally back in May and June. I think they tossed that question around for a few weeks, and then someone came up with the idea of denying his plan and not offering any specifics.

If they got away with it, and it is likely they would since no one could possibly be expecting this, they would have the debate all to themselves. They would get to attack Obama both for what they would call not doing enough to bring the economy around in the past and they would get to attack his future plan and there would be nothing with which the President could respond and attack them back.

To pull this off would require the other piece of cynical magic that the Romney campaign worked on for five months. Romney would have to practice lying about his plan with a straight face. Any question or point that President Obama would raise about the plan that Romney had talked about prior to the debate; Romney would assert that it was not his plan.

In fact, according to various groups, Romney told over 27 lies during the 38 minutes he spoke during the debate. In order to maximize the impact from their plan, the Romney campaign had to work on getting Mitt to deliver what he knew to be completely incorrect statements without hesitating, flinching, looking around, or any other body language, speech or facial cues that give away people who are lying.

It isn’t easy to do. If you think it is, try it sometime. Videotape yourself trying to deliver a few complete lies to a small test group of people as an experiment. You will see how difficult it is. Romney had to do this in front of one of the largest national television audiences in history over a period of 90 minutes and not give himself away at all.

Actually, Romney did flinch once during a question about medical coverage. Other than that, he delivered a lie every 90 seconds as smoothly as most people would tell another person the correct time.

I know the Romney campaign and every other Republican who sees this video is going to say no, what that Steve Leser guy is saying is not true, he doesn’t know what he is talking about. But all you have to do is look at the debate. What did Romney do, what did he say.

In hindsight his plan is pretty obvious. Deny the plan he had been touting for over 18 months, give no specific plan for President Obama to address, lie about anything that could be damaging and deliver those lies authoritatively as if they were the truest things Mitt ever heard or said.

That’s what he did and it’s obvious that this is what he practiced.

It’s not like this is out of character with Mitt Romney. Every single time he has run for office, he has had Republican opponents for the nomination and ultimately Democratic challengers note how he flip flops on the issues all the time, is dishonest, and how there seem to be multiple Mitt Romneys and you never know on a given day which one you are going to meet.

You don’t have to take my word for it, a Youtube search on Romney flip flops yields over 2000 video results, many of these videos were submitted by supporters of the campaigns of various Republican challengers.

Add Rick Perry to the Romney Flip Flop Youtube search and you see Texas governor Rick Perry repeat what I just said about multiple Mitt Romneys almost verbatim.

So, lying and saying a particular plan wasn’t his is completely within the realm of Mitt Romney’s past behavior.

Now all of this would be fine if what Romney participated in was a comedy skit like on Saturday Night Live, or the Colbert report or The Daily Show.

But this wasn’t comedy. This was serious.

This was one of the three chances the American people get every four years to see the two major parties’ Presidential candidates’ debate each other’s proposals.

To make it worse is that each debate has a specific theme. There will not be another Presidential debate this year where the main theme is domestic policy.

This was the only shot at this and Mitt Romney stole the opportunity for the people of this country to get an honest look and distinction between his economic proposals and President Obama’s.

In order to win, in order to get a few percentage points different in the race, this is what Mitt Romney and his campaign practiced for five months; wholesale lying and denying the American people an opportunity to hear his plan and contrast it with President Obama’s.

If you think about it, if this is the best they could do with five months of time to prepare, what does that say about the confidence they have in their ability to convince the American people of any plan they would intend to put forth?

It says that they not only had no confidence, they were pretty sure that if they put a plan out there and tried to defend it during the debate, that they would lose the debate.

Ironic, isn’t it? In trying to use deception to appear better and stronger than they were, the Romney and his campaign demonstrated his weakness convincingly.

So if you think this was wrong of Mitt Romney to do, and I don’t think there is anyone on this planet who would appreciate being lied to and manipulated this way, share this video with everyone you know. Tell people what Mitt Romney did. No one who did this should lead anything or have any major responsibility given to them I don’t care what party they are in or what office to which they aspire.

What Mitt Romney did is unacceptable. Let people know about it
-----------------------------------------
This article first appeared at Democrats for Progress

October 10, 2012

The Plot Behind Mitt Romney's Debate Strategy

?hd=1

Transcript:

Hello, my name is Steve Leser. I am a principal with Democratic Spring Strategies and a writer for Democrats for Progress and I am going to talk about the Romney strategy for the First Debate

In the several weeks long run-up to the October third debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, the Romney campaign let it slip several times that they had been practicing for this debate since at least June. I remember reading that and wondering what he could be working on for so long.

I’ll get back to that in a moment.

One of the astounding things about the October third debate is that it was a debate on domestic policy of which the economy is probably its most important component, and after the debate, we have no idea what one of the candidates would do with regards to the economy if elected.

Think about that.

If you are running in an election to become the executive of any country, state, province, county, city or village, anywhere in the world, you owe one thing to the people who may vote for you.

You owe them a fair representation of how you intend to govern. In terms of the economy, the basics for this are all the same.

Are you going to raise or lower taxes? Are you going to spend more in your term than is currently being spent? Are you going to cut spending? If you are going to lower taxes how are you going to pay for things? If you are going to raise spending how are you going to pay for the increase? If you are going to cut spending, who is going to bear the brunt of those cuts.

If you are having a debate between two or more candidates, the discussion of those specifics is a vital part of helping the people voting to decide which candidate to choose.

The candidates challenge each other regarding their respective plans and tell the American people why their plan is good and why their opponents plan is lacking.

Mitt Romney stood in front of 60 million American people, denied the plan he had been touting for 18 months and didn’t name any plan in its place.

The real loser in what happened in the first debate is the American people. After the debate, virtually all voter groups said that they didn’t receive enough specifics about the candidates’ plans. Actually, there were several specifics outlined by President Obama, including tax breaks for everyone except the wealthiest Americans. There were no specifics from Mitt Romney.

So, back to the five months of practice put in by Romney and his campaign. I thought about it for a few days after the debate. What did they practice? They certainly didn’t practice selling his economic plan because he didn’t talk about one. So what was all that practice about?

Then it hit me.

Every Presidential election year in the U.S., you have debates with a similar dynamic on the economy. The Republican nominee attacks the Democratic nominee for (in the GOP’s opinion) proposing to spend too much and tax too much, and the Democratic nominee attacks the Republican nominee for proposing to cut taxes too much increasing the deficit and for potentially needing to cut programs like Social Security and Medicare.

The public knows about these lines of attack, voters already know where they stand on those issues and thus the debate doesn’t move many people either way.

What if, however, you could make it completely one sided?

I think this is the question the Romney senior campaign staff was floating internally back in May and June. I think they tossed that question around for a few weeks, and then someone came up with the idea of denying his plan and not offering any specifics.

If they got away with it, and it is likely they would since no one could possibly be expecting this, they would have the debate all to themselves. They would get to attack Obama both for what they would call not doing enough to bring the economy around in the past and they would get to attack his future plan and there would be nothing with which the President could respond and attack them back.

To pull this off would require the other piece of cynical magic that the Romney campaign worked on for five months. Romney would have to practice lying about his plan with a straight face. Any question or point that President Obama would raise about the plan that Romney had talked about prior to the debate; Romney would assert that it was not his plan.

In fact, according to various groups, Romney told over 27 lies during the 38 minutes he spoke during the debate. In order to maximize the impact from their plan, the Romney campaign had to work on getting Mitt to deliver what he knew to be completely incorrect statements without hesitating, flinching, looking around, or any other body language, speech or facial cues that give away people who are lying.

It isn’t easy to do. If you think it is, try it sometime. Videotape yourself trying to deliver a few complete lies to a small test group of people as an experiment. You will see how difficult it is. Romney had to do this in front of one of the largest national television audiences in history over a period of 90 minutes and not give himself away at all.

Actually, Romney did flinch once during a question about medical coverage. Other than that, he delivered a lie every 90 seconds as smoothly as most people would tell another person the correct time.

I know the Romney campaign and every other Republican who sees this video is going to say no, what that Steve Leser guy is saying is not true, he doesn’t know what he is talking about. But all you have to do is look at the debate. What did Romney do, what did he say.

In hindsight his plan is pretty obvious. Deny the plan he had been touting for over 18 months, give no specific plan for President Obama to address, lie about anything that could be damaging and deliver those lies authoritatively as if they were the truest things Mitt ever heard or said.

That’s what he did and it’s obvious that this is what he practiced.

It’s not like this is out of character with Mitt Romney. Every single time he has run for office, he has had Republican opponents for the nomination and ultimately Democratic challengers note how he flip flops on the issues all the time, is dishonest, and how there seem to be multiple Mitt Romneys and you never know on a given day which one you are going to meet.

You don’t have to take my word for it, a Youtube search on Romney flip flops yields over 2000 video results, many of these videos were submitted by supporters of the campaigns of various Republican challengers.

Add Rick Perry to the Romney Flip Flop Youtube search and you see Texas governor Rick Perry repeat what I just said about multiple Mitt Romneys almost verbatim.

So, lying and saying a particular plan wasn’t his is completely within the realm of Mitt Romney’s past behavior.

Now all of this would be fine if what Romney participated in was a comedy skit like on Saturday Night Live, or the Colbert report or The Daily Show.

But this wasn’t comedy. This was serious.

This was one of the three chances the American people get every four years to see the two major parties’ Presidential candidates’ debate each other’s proposals.

To make it worse is that each debate has a specific theme. There will not be another Presidential debate this year where the main theme is domestic policy.

This was the only shot at this and Mitt Romney stole the opportunity for the people of this country to get an honest look and distinction between his economic proposals and President Obama’s.

In order to win, in order to get a few percentage points different in the race, this is what Mitt Romney and his campaign practiced for five months; wholesale lying and denying the American people an opportunity to hear his plan and contrast it with President Obama’s.

If you think about it, if this is the best they could do with five months of time to prepare, what does that say about the confidence they have in their ability to convince the American people of any plan they would intend to put forth?

It says that they not only had no confidence, they were pretty sure that if they put a plan out there and tried to defend it during the debate, that they would lose the debate.

Ironic, isn’t it? In trying to use deception to appear better and stronger than they were, the Romney and his campaign demonstrated his weakness convincingly.

So if you think this was wrong of Mitt Romney to do, and I don’t think there is anyone on this planet who would appreciate being lied to and manipulated this way, share this video with everyone you know. Tell people what Mitt Romney did. No one who did this should lead anything or have any major responsibility given to them I don’t care what party they are in or what office to which they aspire.

What Mitt Romney did is unacceptable. Let people know about it
----------------------------------------
This article was originally posted at Democrats for Progress

October 5, 2012

Snow White, Superman and Pinocchio are walking along... (stay with me, its a political joke)

Snow White, Superman and Pinocchio are walking along.
They see a sign: "Contest for World's Most Beautiful Woman." Snow White goes in, later comes out smiling, wearing a crown.

They walk along and see another sign: "Contest for World's Strongest Man." Superman goes in, later comes out smiling, wearing the belt.

They walk along and see a sign: "Contest for World's Greatest Liar." Pinocchio goes in, later comes out with his head down crying.

"Who the hell is Mitt Romney?" Pinocchio sobs.

October 5, 2012

Republicans are spinning more conspiracies today than you would hear at a truther convention

Apoplectic might even be too mild of a word.

The unemployment rate has been steadily falling under President Obama since the end of his first year in office.
It was over 10% and has been falling at a pretty steady rate. Democratic policies work. Supply side economics don't work.
The irony of Republican obstructionism of Obama's policies is, the drop in unemployment and improvement of the economy is all due to Obama and his policies. Republicans cannot lay claim to any of it.

Obama and Democratic policies have caused the unemployment rate has fall to 7.8% Republicans. Deal with it.

October 4, 2012

My article: The Flip Flopping Say Anything to Win Romney is BACK! - 1st Debate Recap

The Flip Flopping Say Anything to Win Romney is BACK! - 1st Debate Recap

Mitt Romney had a big advantage going into this debate. He knew he was going to pull the dirty (and pretty strange) trick of denying the economic and tax plan he had been touting for the past 18 months.

It’s pretty hard for a candidate to compare their concrete plan to a fantasy series of goals thrown out by their opponent. That is what happened at Wednesday night’s debate. Romney denied the details of his own plan and said he would create a gazillion jobs, cut the deficit, spend a ton more money on defense, not cut spending on education or any entitlements, and cut taxes more. He gave no details about how he would do any of that and watching his spin-meisters try to explain that away as not a big deal after the debate was pretty amusing.

It doesn’t take a mathematician to conclude that you cannot cut taxes, cut the deficit, keep all other spending constant and increase spending by trillions of dollars on defense. It sounds really good and if anyone could really do that they would deserve to be elected to just about anything, but it would require a new math wherein a bigger number subtracted from a smaller number would not equal less than zero.

A fantasy series of totally unrealistic goals with no plan to reach them was the order of the night for Romney. On everything from the economy and taxes to healthcare to education to anything else Jim Lehrer asked about, Mitt Romney indicated he would achieve all of these spectacular levels of performance with no details of how he intended to do any of them.

With that kind of tactic, there’s no wonder the first reaction from lots of folks is that Romney won. Fantasies and dreams can easily beat reality. Anyone can walk into a debate and claim they can do all sorts of things if they don’t have to back it up.

The last time we had a Republican claim they could do all of these things and not create a deficit, we had George W. Bush accusing Al Gore of using ‘fuzzy math’. The problem is, Gore was right and ‘W’ created massive deficits. The difference is, unlike Obama, Bush inherited a strong economy with a surplus budget.

The key question for me is, at what point will the American people say, OK Mitt, this all sounds good, but how exactly do you plan to do it? Part of that question will be, now that Romney has suddenly repudiated his own economic and tax plan, what, exactly is his plan now?

We all should have known things like this were coming. In two separate Presidential election years, Romney was roundly criticized by his Republican rivals for flip flopping and making things up. In 2004 John McCain was famously asked in a debate to react to Romney’s plan on the economy and he responded “Which one”. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, here we go again.