“Romney was able to address potential voters without his remarks being filtered through the mainly hostile media”
“Romney came out swinging, passionately and with great articulacy, clearly knocking back Obama and impressing the more than 50 million viewers”
Even though President Barack Obama was finally nailed as superficial, incompetent, lazy and economical with the truth and will probably lose the election, the BBC’s “flagship” current affairs programme NewsNight didn’t think the ramifications of the first Presidential debate were worth discussing.
You could argue that the event changed the course of the American election and now Romney is in the fast lane for victory (and I would), but no attempt to dissect this game-changing event appeared on Thursday’s NewsNight. Not only did the U.S. media, (with some notable exceptions effectively part of the Obama re-election campaign), report that the challenger was a clear winner, if you want powerful evidence of Romney’s win, you only have to look at the lefty blogs and cable news shows.
Andrew Sullivan, relentlessly bending the truth in his Sunday Times column and in his blog in the U.S. Daily Beast to re-elect the nasty and arrogant Obama (even the British media have been repeating the mantra that Obama wins the nice-guy stakes when he clearly is nothing of the sort) was wringing his hands before the debate ended, shattered by Obama’s lackadaisical performance. Chris Matthews, anchor on egregiously leftie MSNBC’s Hardball, ranted at length about Obama’s poor form.
Romney’s win is important because it probably marked the first time that the American public, at least the crucial undecided so-called swing voters, turned seriously to consider who they would go for. Romney had been a bit behind in the polls, suffering from the relentless and childish Obama campaign adds trying to make him look bad. But Romney came out swinging, passionately and with great articulacy, clearly knocking back Obama and impressing the more than 50 million viewers. He talked about how Obama’s policies weren’t working, leading to huge unemployment, and how his tax plans will make it worse. Romney made the case that higher taxes will hurt growth and job creation and reduce government revenues. Obamacare is a job destroyer above all else. Obama’s failure to allow new energy exploration was skewered. His wasteful support of wonky “green” energy programmes was ridiculed.
My favourite line was one that our own dear Conservative led-coalition might take on board, as we waste money that we’ve borrowed to make Cameron look good in the third world.
Talking about how America was suffering from trickle-down government, Romney nailed Obama’s failure to control runaway, ill-disciplined spending.
“I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for,” Romney said.
This also was the first time that Romney was able to address potential voters without his remarks being filtered through the mainly hostile media. Obama was almost contrite in the debate, unable to match Romney’s arguments, but soon afterwards showed he hadn’t learned anything by repeating his campaign tactic of avoiding discussion of issues like the economy, lying about the man and using infantile class war rhetoric.
“I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney,” Mr. Obama told 12,000 supporters at a rally after the debate.
“But it couldn’t be Mitt Romney, because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favour the wealthy. The fellow onstage last night said he didn’t know anything about that.”
The Wall Street Journal was impressed by Romney.
“The best debate effort by a Republican nominee since Ronald Reagan in 1980,” the WSJ said.
But the BBC didn’t think the event was important enough to be aired on NewsNight. Given that the British press and the BBC regular report America through the eyes of the mainly rancid and left of centre U.S. media, perhaps NewsNight was genuinely flummoxed that events were not turning out in the way they had predicted, and hoped. I wonder if NewsNight will change its tune when it becomes more likely that Obama will only be in office long enough to finish off Jimmy Carter’s second term? Two more presidential debates and one VP stand off to go. Fingers crossed for a Romney victory and the chance to turnaround the horrendous, counterproductive missteps of the Obama presidency.
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