So this is the guy who is going to get tough with Netanyahu in the Second Administration? He can’t even get tough with his Republican opponent. After this evening, I think it is more reasonable to expect that Romney will contain Bibi.It is possible O’s advisers didn’t want him attacking in Round 1, as no black politician can appear to be too aggressive or angry and keep his white voters on board. With the debate criticism he will now receive, O can be far more pit-bullish in the next round. I believe something similar happened in his debates with Hillary. He waited for her and Bill to attack first before giving it back-in-kind. That is an optimistic interpretation though.Far more likely, it was decided he should channel his inner “conciliator” and not antagonize the independents. Didn’t work too well!It also seems as if Obama has no idea what he wants to do in his Second Term, other than cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
My wife also quit after 15 minutes.
I understand that’s Romney’s strength: He knows how to be upbeat and concise. In an ADD age, upbeat and concise will always beat out theoretical and longwinded.
Obama seemed a little arrogant in his presentation. The attitude was, I live this stuff so I don’t have to practice. While for his part, I got the feeling that Romney had been with his team practicing and practicing. He knew how to play the game. He was sharp, like a wing in hockey.
I stopped watching because it’s like Leni Riefenstahl movies — you realize, you too can be taken in, by the simplicity, the ease, the slickness, the movie starrish looks.
James North focused on the journalists:
I understand that Obama might have been doing the rope-a-dope in the first round. [A reference to Muhammad Ali sinking into the ropes to allow George Foreman to punch himself out] But it’s unrealistic to expect that Obama will put Romney on the floor. Romney’s not Gerald Ford.
It’s a rare occasion when I learn something valuable from a New York Times editorial. But its lead editorial showing how many times Romney lied. I assumed he lied a few times. They showed that he lied over and over again.
And if I taught a journalism class, I would hold up Jim Lehrer as an example of what journalists shouldn’t do. The gesturing and half-formed superficial statements; he has never asked a probing question. Journalists have to learn to ask probing statements. This guy merely reflects the conventional wisdom and he shows why the heart of the MacNeil Lehrer Report has been a tedious, centrist, dull unchallenging program.
Obama’s weakness is that he cannot seem overly aggressive or he will evoke a scary angry black man image to marginal white voters. How many suburban whites are going to vote for Jeremiah Wright?
Mitt took a page from Ronald Reagan and even sounded like him.
White voters like angry passionate white guys. Malcolm X not so much.
Perhaps Obama is tired of being president? Maybe he no longer wants the job? That is the impression he gave last night — beginning with that opening line about how he wished he were elsewhere. Romney convinced the audience that he really wants the job.
Jim Lehrer encapsulates everything that is wrong with contemporary American mainstream journalism — a completely empty head masquerading as a wise old head. Worthless. A specialist in pretentious blather. (What do you want to bet that he is a “liberal Zionist.”)
Sometimes Romney reminds one a bit of Christian Bale in American Psycho — no one can fault him for his “energy” — he was almost bursting out of his suit.
I watched the whole painful thing..lying Romney and dull Obama.
Can’t figure why Obama was so passive
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/obama-his-words-his-deeds/?page=2
Barack Obama from the start of his presidency has exhibited an almost exclusive taste for the dignified part of government. During the BP oil spill, his remoteness from the plod and toil of problem-solving showed day after day. That was a “teachable moment,” if ever there was one: a public catastrophe that implicated the environment and energy resources close to home for all Americans. The moment escaped this president, as the nuclear disaster in Japan has also escaped him. He never broke a sweat as he could have—literally and figuratively—by descending into the muck on the spoiled Louisiana beaches. Few presidents have ever seemed farther than Obama from being “in the thick of things.” The impression came back as he left Washington with Netanyahu triumphant, and took a plane for Ireland to speak of hope and peace.
Obama’s management of the killing of bin Laden is the one action of his presidency in which his leadership has seemed beyond challenge. “Revenge,” wrote Francis Bacon, “is a kind of wild justice,” and that sentiment fitted the reactions of most Americans on hearing the news. Obama guided the popular feeling when he said “Justice has been done.” Yet revenge and justice are, to the citizens of a constitutional democracy, different ideas, and a leader more scrupulous or less confused would take pains to keep them separate. A string of questions in any case soon became a drag on the event. How could bin Laden’s residence in a prominent house in a garrison town have been concealed for so long? Did elements of the Pakistani intelligence service know of this hideout? What now prevents American commanders in the field from concluding that our allies are acting in complicity with our enemies? The aftermath of the bin Laden killing has left the US as deeply entangled as ever in a hostile region, with no prospect of amelioration from any extension of the present policy.
On May 26, at the urging of the President, the Senate and House voted to renew the Patriot Act. Obama signed it with a teleportable pen, from France. He has said that he would look to the future, not the past—a slogan that nullifies the large part of justice that consists of accountability—but here was an element of the Bush-Cheney past that he chose to project into the future with as little discussion as possible. Obama’s real trouble has come, however, in his attempts to inhabit the present. He is slower to react than most people, far slower than most politicians. He gave away six months of the health care debate without pressing his initial advantage while the resistance sprang up all around, the Tea Party was created, and congressional enemies gained on him. He let the controversy over his birth certificate blow up to absurd proportions over two and a half years before dispelling all doubts at a stroke in a press briefing that was hastily called and testily managed. At present, he is waiting for Afghanistan to calm down and let him withdraw troops on a deliberate schedule. But things can flare up while you are waiting, or flare up elsewhere and set back every cautious preparation.
The position of a moderate who aspires to shake the world into a new shape presents a continuous contradiction. For the moderate feels constrained not to say anything startling, and not to do anything very fast. But just as there is trouble with doing things on the old lines, there is trouble, too, with letting people understand things on the old lines. At least, there is if you have your sights set on changing the nature of the game. Obama is caught in this contradiction, and keeps getting deeper in it, like a man who sinks in quicksand both the more he struggles and the more he stays still. This is one lesson of his passage from inaction in Egypt to action in Libya, and from his summons of reform in Cairo in June 2009 to the guarded speech from the sidelines in May 2011.
The passive-aggressive Obama has forever meant be passive to right wingers and agressive towards even the lowliest of his would-be liberal allies.