Monday, October 8, 2012

Who won? Who knows?

Ok, I'm going to have to say it.  Yes, in hindsight, and with the help of EVERYONE in the media saying Romney won the debate -- and with even Obama admitting that he made a poor showing --  I can see why people are saying Romney won the debate.  But are we really sure that's what those polled were thinking when they watched the debate, or is that just the position they ended up imputing to themselves after the relentless Romney-won-the-debate drumbeat from the media?  The latest Pew poll says that:

2/3 of all registered voters think Romney won

20 percent think Obama won

72 percent of independents think Romney won

78 percent of independents who watched the debate think Romney won.

I happened to be watching on the HuffingtonPost channel.  The post-debate commentators were not exactly world-class pundits -- and they were extremely young, and couldn't help themselves from talking about drinking games that one could play during the debate -- but clearly had some journalism experience.  Yet none of them seemed to sense, in the immediate aftermath, that Romney had won as "big" as everyone now thinks he did.  In fact, I don't think any of them called the debate for either side -- their unanimous view seemed to be that the whole thing was a "snoozefest."  I remember the woman saying something like "I'm a wonk, and even I was bored by all the numbers they were throwing around."  In other words, while these may have been average journalists, they were certainly better informed than the "average" voter.  So did "average" voters really think Romney "won" the debate at the time?  Who knows?

I was watching too, and I wasn't really sure.  Yes, Romney was ruder to the moderator, and therefore got to say more of what he wanted to say, even when he wasn't really supposed to.  But you'd LOSE a high school debate by default if you did that.  And from what I could gather, his plan is to pay for the tax cut to the rich by stopping funding for public television.  It turns out that public broadcasting only gets $430 million.  If Romney's tax cuts really will amount to $5 trillion, that $430 million is less than 0.001 percent of what he needs to help out his rich buddies (and himself).  It's also a trivial amount compared to the hundreds of billions Romney wants to pump into the defense budget.

Yes I was a bit embarrassed by Barack's performance.  Romney came out with a whole new game plan, and Obama did not think well on his feet.  He kept repeating the $5 trillion, without explaining how radically the "new" Romney was departing from the "old" one.  Romney was telling a completely different story, but rather than attack him on that, Obama kept attacking the old story.  

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