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He has to pay the full price for his lies during the first debate.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
This man cannot be elected. His running mate cannot be elected. Its debating someone on what they believe but they don’t have any beliefs. Who or what is this guy?
The republicans are trying for a figurehead like BushII, but 2012 is not 2000
Will we ever learn?
The master then and still. As a third-party candidate today, he could probably win. For two simple reasons, he was firmly committed to the New Deal programs and regulatory legislation and he had no illusions as to who his domestic enemies were and fought them at every opportunity. He would have made mincemeat out of Mitt in a debate and relished the experience.
Freaking Awesome!
FDR on the Repugs: “We will do all of them and it will not cost anybody anything.” They have been lying to us for 80 yrs.
Romney should tweak his campaign motto from “Believe in America” to “Believe in Nothing.”
Other than not being as effective at spewing the lies as Reagan and GWB were, Mitt’s doing just fine. It’s really easy to win with nothing but a pack of lies when the best the opposition can come up with is a spit-polished-GOP lie.
magnificent!!!!
Brilliant collection of back-up statements that show Romney’s brash ability to lie, distort the truth, omit factual data, play fast and loose with the facts and so on.
I hope his debate staff knows how to operate a fire extinguisher, cause the man’s pants are a five alarmer.
That’s the best Chicago can do?
I’ve already debunked these two so-called lies on this blog today…
Obama is a child…
Romney is a man…
We need a leader…
Sorry Sam – you debunked nothing. You’re just another pea from the pod Romney came from; smug and dishonest.
Your retort is known as “ad homenin”…
That’s Latin.
You guys actually used Andrea Mitchell as your “fact-checker”?
Y’all must be desperate. I can’t wait until the next debate, when Romney demolishes your “he lied” argument.
This will be good!
Finally, the Wizard is exposed!!!
“ad homenin” (sic)
Hey everybody, he knows Latin!
well, not really. “in” isn’t a case ending. should be “nem”, 3rd declension, but I think you know that
Bingo. Thus my use of the Latin adverb sic when quoting it.
And I don’t even know Latin. Just spelling.
In his defense it may be spelled that way on SamL’s planet.
Just sayin
Ah yes, the planet made famous by Barney Frank
I believe the correct sentence is: “Hey, everybody, he knows him sum Latin!”
Actually, Sam–that’s kind of the theme that’s dominated after the debate: Romney may have ‘won’ because of his aggressiveness, but he lied his ass of to do it.
However, it’s not really “our” argument. It’s very similar to how Ryan’s convention speech was perceived in the days after he delivered it. Because all anyone is talking about is how much Romney lied and Big Bird.
Never mind that in light of continued good economic news (40 months of private sector job growth), you guys have to embrace another conspiracy. Think that wins you many votes?
And, of course, Romney kind of has a reputation for saying one thing one day and something else the next. He’ll tell a group of rich donors one thing behind closed doors and tell the rest of us he didn’t really mean it. He’ll tell people he has a plan for pre-existing condition and send Eric Ferhnstrom to tell the press that, in fact, he doesn’t.
That Romney is an unapologetic, serial liar isn’t a hard sell.
But if you want to talk desperate, I’d say it’s probably the man who thought the only way he could win a debate is if he lied about every position he’s taken in the past year. But if you’re expecting a repeat performance or that the President won’t adjust his strategy, you’re a fool. You’re someone who doesn’t take his opponent seriously and doesn’t think he has to. I’m afraid your candidate feels the same way.
Because if you think you’ve won the election and that one good night for Romney erases the 47% comment, the disastrous overseas trip, the flood of gaffes, a divisive VP pick, a lackluster convention, an old man yelling at an empty chair, and utterly failing at campaign basics, then you’re about to learn some tough political lessons.
Just ask Presidents Mondale and Kerry.
Just back from dinner.
Poor baby. You get nothing but what you deserve. Whining in typical repub fashion while spewing falsehoods all over the place.
Good night.
What’s with conservatives and their homoerotic imagery of their leaders?
They can’t get enough of their strong hard brave manly men… But Romney? I just don’t see it. Sorry Conservatives.
Also note that he specified gender with his description of Romney (man) but not Obama (child.) If he wanted to be consistent, he would have called Obama a “boy.”
Oh. Right. Nevermind.
Come on, Nick. You think you’re fooling anybody?
I was extremely disappointed right after the debate, but with distance have come around quite a bit. The idea that this was a bold strategy to just let Romney keep talking, and not use the debate to try and score big points, is starting to make sense in retrospect. It’s Obama’s style to take a punch if he thinks it will help him win the fight in the end.
So now he has Romney’s lies, told to 60 million (or whatever) Americans to use as fodder for the rest of the campaign. Suspecting, or even knowing, somebody is lying isn’t nearly as enraging as when you’ve been sucked into the lie before finding out it’s bs. The real issue has always been Romney’s dishonesty and unlikableness. Nothing in the debate changed that, and now the Dems have the means to attack those qualities further. The he-said-she-said defense won’t work anymore because too many people know what he really said.
Where you’re “11-dimensional chess” analysis of Obama’s debate strategy falls apart is that it would have been a high-wire act without a net and Obama is too conservative and risk adverse to have approved such a plan (assuming that team-Obama was anywhere clever enough to have concocted it in the first place). Nope, he went with the don’t make any mistakes, don’t make waves, and get out of it alive with your lead intact plan.
Bob Herbert nailed it:
Those unable to acknowledge serious defects in the character and/or behavior of “their guy” are as mature as a gaggle of screaming teeny-boppers.
Yeah its a stretch. More like serendipity.
I think he went into the debate with a careful plan. I don’t think the plan was well-designed for the forum. I think his plan was to defend his record and talk about his values and to just let Romney’s inner dick shine through. But the problem with that is that he had a moderator who had no intention of challenging anything either candidate said. That left him with a choice between arguing with Romney the whole night or making the points he wanted to make. Too often, he left lies go unrebutted. But that was a trade off he had to make over and over again.
A better strategy would have anticipated the problem, and would have been more focused on Romney’s character and controlling the time.
But I personally thought he did fine in the debate. My only real complaint is that he seemed to get tired after about 60 minutes. His energy wasn’t high enough.
Huh?
Because a single moderator and two candidates at podiums was some novel experiment? Sheesh — it was exactly like the Biden/Palin forum with a (PBS) moderator that didn’t interfere with Palin’s nonsense.
As the above video clip of FDR reminds us, Republicans have been lying since at least the early 1930s — and yet, Democrats since after LBJ act all surprised when they do.
What we got was Obama as Mitt v.2008 defending complicated and non-robust domestic policies and Mitt v.2012 selling Reagan v. 1980 in a new bottle. As night follows day, the Democratic partisans rushed in to rescue their guy with clay feet. I so regret having done that when Clinton was in the WH — but at least I (expletive deleted) learned not to do that again because it completely distracted me from all the dreadful legislation that Clinton supported and signed and his bad policies. Thus, it was easy to see what Obama was set to deliver once he began naming his cabinet.
But there was something even more important than a wide-awake and engaged POTUS that was missing in the debate and from his campaign and like the “dog that didn’t bark,” nobody on this side of the aisle seems to have noticed.
Actually it was somewhat different than before. In 2008 Lehrer tried to get Obama and McCain to talk to each other but they both refused and stuck with the traditional pattern of alternating memorized speeches. Lehrer was openly frustrated.
This was different because Romney did what Lehrer wanted unlike McCain – and Obama wasn’t ready.
But other than that I agree with the thrust of the point that it is LONG PAST TIME for the president to point out that the other side lies their butts off. No — not just in the comfort of campaign gatherings, but to his opponent’s face in a debate.
In addition to FDR consider that the most quotable president ever was Truman – in fact a famous play “Give ’em hell, Harry” was created using his actual quotes. I’m sure every Democratic political junkie knows all of them so I won’t repeat them here … but although the pre-McCarthyite GOP he faced gave him lots of opportunities for zingers they don’t hold a candle in that regard to today’s GOP.
Meh.
I basically agreed with you that they should have game-planned a Lehrer-moderated debate better.
As for the rest, I still a fundamental and important difference between Obama and Clinton, and between Obama’s goals and the DLC’s goals.
It’s actually really important that Obama didn’t have Dick Morris whispering in his ear in the two years after he got shellacked in his first midterm. Obama got the health care bill done, and all we need to do is hold on like grim death until Nov. 6th, and we’ll have won that 64 year long battle. The health care bill, combined with demographic changes, will break the back of the modern GOP. And we’ll have a long run of left-center dominance in this country.
Obama hasn’t passed anything like the shitty foreign national-hostile welfare reform bill, or the deregulation of the banks or the Iraq Liberation bill. He didn’t listen when people told him to scale back his health care bill.
But, remember, Obama’s superdelegates were from places like the Dakotas and Wyoming and Montana. His coalition within the party started out heavy with the Kent Conrads and Max Baucuses and Tom Daschles. He created a progressive coalition in the electorate, but his coalition within the party was much more rural and socially conservative. The industrial midwest, for example, mostly lined up behind Hillary, including some of the black members.
Obama was given the keys, but not to govern as a Bobby Rush Democrat. He can’t maintain a majority party that way. As it was, he sacrificed his majorities and the Blue Dogs were cut in half because he forged ahead on health care and made everyone walk the plank.
By most measures, he’s the most progressive president we have ever had. FDR was more progressive on economics, but he had a boisterous labor movement and actual communists running around to scare people. On social issues, Obama has no rival in our county’s history.
Are you seriously this historically ill-informed?
Teddy Roosevelt was more progressive with his trust busting than Obama was with Dodd-Frank, which the lobbyists are doing their suck off any meat on the bones of. The Nixon proposed the EPA and Obama proposes “clean coal,” more offshore drilling and nuclear power plants. I could go on and on but perhaps you mean “progressive” more as changing things up and not necessarily for the benefit of ordinary people. In that sense, declaring that the POTUS has the power to order the assassination of anyone anywhere she/he wants is progressive.
This has been Boo’s theme for years now, that Obama is the most progressive president EVAH – or maybe since FDR (depends on the post). It’s a hard point of contention. On the one side are those who argue that the president can only do so much without Congressional support. With the sudden move to treat the filibuster as business-as-usual the President, so this argument goes, could only get laws passed that were approved by either the most conservative parts of the D caucus (when the D’s had 60 Senators) or the least wacko parts of the R caucus.
On the other side are two points. First, that the measure of a President is also felt in terms of appointments and choices of how to administer laws, and on those terms he has been basically centrist – putting Republicans in charge of key areas like the Fed and choosing to administer programs like HAMP in ways that favor Wall Street, not the people it was designed to help. I am in that camp. The second argument is that the President could have done a better job lobbying Congress. It’s really unknown if Obama could have gotten more out of Congress early on (such as the public option or a bigger or less tax-cut-focused stimulus) – but to me that is more a debate of effectiveness. However, I do think there is a valid question of what Obama was going for with both – and a sense that he started negotiating from a centrist position (his initial proposals were already laced with compromises).
But, all that is moot between now and the first week in November. The focus has to be on winning. After that we can restart the lobbying of the President to live up to his party’s principles. Remember his first act after winning 4 years ago was to select Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff – a clear signal as any of what was to come. We can hope he’ll do a lot better with his second chance.
That could be – although I commented in advance that in 2008 Lehrer tried to get the two candidates to talk to each other I didn’t realize the degree to which this would turn into a free-for-all … and likely Obama’s team didn’t either.
But he needs to be on his A game in the next two. Maybe he did lay a trap for Romney etc etc in debate 1 … but amidst the noise of all the advertisements all the low info voter knows is that Romney won and that he wants to cancel big bird. The idea that Romney would ultimately pay the price for his Ignore the Facts strategy shows no signs, 3 days later, of being accurate – and 3 days is really the measuring stick for the long-term impression of the debate.
Sorry, Obama. I know you LOVE to be Mr Compromise, Mr Above-the-Fray, Mr Centrist. But guess what – you’re the Democrat and as a result the centrist pundits have decided that you are the left extreme. You can’t play the role you played at Harvard, as a community organizer, in the Illinois Senate, and in the US Senate. You have to be an advocate.
And that means pointing out that the other guy is lying his butt off.
Gore made the mistake of trying to learn from his mistake in the first debate. Obama should be careful about repeating that.
The next debate is a town hall forum on Long Island with questions from pre-screened undecided voters. There is almost nothing about the last debate that will be useful for preparing for the next one.
The third debate will return to a similar format as the first, but the subject will be foreign policy. Obama should be better prepared to control the time and to correct the record when appropriate.
The second debate is the town hall? Thanks for that info – somehow I missed that as I was used to the recent history (starting in 1992) of doing the “town hall” last.
I don’t trust the town hall format. Democrats historically do a poor job of getting their plants set up to answer their questions while Republicans are very good at it (remember the anti-abortion question that blindsided Kerry?). Oh, the GOP was totally unprepared in 1992 when Clinton introduced this format, but they’ve gotten better every year.
So, if debate 2 is the the town hall format then the best Obama can do is tie. I thought debate 3 was “half” foreign policy – Obama has an opportunity to shine there IF he can get past his personal need to come across as the centrist who is “above the fray”.
About Obama. I’m not worried. There’s a word we used to hear a lot more in previous elections that we haven’t as much as I expected this year:
authenticity
In my view Obama has been delivering it. He has a body of thought in speeches that is consistent to a fairly high degree. Even his campaign organization reflects Obama’s personality and experience.
Romney is the complete opposite, a total phony.
I think Obama knows he has to stay true to himself no matter what hoops the circus masters may want him to jump through.
Not chess, just a simple decision not to get into a catfight. To me in retrospect, Obama managed to look presidential and fact based, while Romney looked capable of making a presentation, but more like a desperate kid trying to impress an admission committee than somebody in charge. But there’s no denying Obama provided way too much fodder for a media machine that was going to keep the campaign a horserace for as long as possible.
Obama is conservative and risk averse? The guy who went all in on health care reform when everyone including his own chief of staff were screaming at him to take on something easy first? The guy who ordered the Bin Laden raid? The guy who debated the entire Republican Party by himself?
No, I think the immature people are those who repeat the same whine over and over again regardless of what the actual conversation is about under the mistaken belief that if they do it enough it will make others “wake up” instead of tuning out.
First of all, there was no “health care reform.” In private consultation with hospitals and health insurance companies, a deal was crafted that benefits both of those major stakeholders in the dysfunctional US health care system. Not that there aren’t some goodies tucked into it for certain individuals and advocacy groups. More people will have some form of health insurance coverage — but it will cost them more and cover less than what is anticipated.
Second, who “the guy went all in on” for health insurance reform were those well-informed enough to recognize that single-payer actually addresses some of the problems. It’s weaker cousin, the public option, could begin pushing us in the right direction or could end up being a disaster, but better than a mandate to buy private (for-profit) health insurance.
How was the raid on the OBL house high risk? The US goes in and blows up houses everyday that we never hear about. If the intended target hadn’t been in that house, we wouldn’t have heard about it.
All true. Obamacare is what everyone figured was going to happen in 1993 before Clinton fumbled. When it finally passed all the health insurance stocks skyrocketed.
And OBL? You’re totally right, but unfortunately Boo’s primary weakness is he’s so seeped in the extreme pro-military mindset of the US that he doesn’t get this point. Obama -or Bush – could have run 1000 failed missions to kill OBL and no one would ever have known because these “special ops” missions occur on average multiple times per day and we are allowed to know about them only when it suits the powers in control. There was ZERO risk to Obama.
Why Bush didn’t give a shit about Obama is another question – one in which the answer is probably hinted at by the coincidence that there was a video or audio communique from OBL every time Bush’s ratings fell – notably 4 days before the 2004 election.
OBL as the boogieman worked well to GWB’s benefit. The tape released 10/04 might be the only real October surprise actually perpetrated in the country. However, don’t think GWB was uninterested in nabbing OBL — his whereabouts, dead or alive, were unknown — or perhaps GWB was told by his Saudi buddies to back off on OBL and that he would be taken care of when the risk of blow-back was low.
While Obama was definitely off his game Wednesday, he did just okay under the circumstances and I think it will benefit him in the overall race that he didn’t swing and miss the shape-shifter he encountered onstage. Like everyone, I wanted him to smack Romney down, but he probably came in expecting an honest debate and was unprepared for what followed. So he laid low and rode it out without incident.
To me, Romney came off as “scolding” toward Obama and the moderator, reminding me of really bad, abusive managers or of spoiled brats who nag incessantly until they get their way. And he lied his ass off – pathologically – like a twelve year-old who can’t even remember his long trail of lies so he just denies he ever said those things. He was prepared for Obama to call him out on everything he’d said previous to that date so he created a whole new identity for himself – one that focus groups say they want in a President – which only confused everyone who has been paying any attention at all. Diehard Republicans (including his terrible advisers) who are used to “conflicting realities” ate it up – but he’s already got their vote. Everyone else was probably repulsed.
Since the media came for the prize fight that they had been promoting for weeks, they left very disappointed.
So, what stuck?
At one point — the $5 trillion or whatever — I thought Obama looked genuinely shocked at Romney’s bareass lying. They probably expected him to be more restrained in from of a large national audience.
You could tell he was genuinely pissed at Leher, too.
I think it as a strategy to not be confrontational but even with that Obama could have put more oomph in his performance and he wouldn’t have been as roundly criticized as he was.
He just needed to add some energy and it would have been seen as much more of a draw
Just saw a great Obama commercial out her in CA that brands Romney as a liar because of his “no 5 trillion tax cut in my plan” lie during the debate. Obama gave his opponent some rope during the debate, and now he is hanging him with it.
Yes, it’s a nice ad.
Why is it running in CA?
Winning the House of Representatives.
OK -hope that is the case. I would LOVE to see evidence that Obama’s team is investing in Congress, not just in their own guy’s campaign.
Only in Progressive fantasy land.
Romney has proposed a reduction in tax rates offset by a reduction in deductions.
Just like Reagan reduced the highest marginal tax rate to 28 percent, yet increased federal revenue.
Progressive dishonesty regarding tax rates and tax revenue is truly amazing.
Romney’s superior command of facts should prove interesting during the next debate if the topic of his “lies” comes up!
But these so-called “lies” have already been refuted, several times!
Most notably by me, on this blog!
Though it appears the censorship police may have been out in force tonight!
Truly amazing…keep repeating a lie enough (in this case, accuse your opponent of lying), and you actually start to believe your own bull sh-t!
Nope. Because I’m right!
Sam, your intellectual dishonesty is simply astounding. And you are now just spamming the same crap repeatedly, having presented no evidence for your arguments. How republican!
Your whining about ad hominem attacks just makes you look pathetic, since the characterizations of you are true. You are smug and dishonest, just like your ‘man’.
You’ll be getting donuts from now.
Paper or ???? Was Mitt Cheating???
<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/GQZ5_qdHLV8″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQZ5_qdHLV8
People are saying it was just a handkerchief. To me, it still looks like a piece of paper.
Glad to hear you say that. It looks like folded paper wrapped in a handkerchief to me. It falls too heavily on the podium for light cloth (lawn) it’s actually pretty heavy considering it’s not very thick
Watch it from the foley point of view http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foley_artist
Cloth totally doesn’t work. The object is heavier on the side closest to M.