Watching the Denver Demolition last night, the thought struck me that the attempts by the Obama people to lower the expectations going into this thing, didn’t do the job nearly as well as they needed to. This is clearly a case of expectations not being set low enough.Obama’s people tried, as you’ll recall to lower the expectations of Obama’s performance in the first debate, giving all sorts of excuses. The excuses didn’t work well enough, didn’t lower the expectations to the reality of Obama’s failure, last night.
[1]Obama was floundering the whole night. It had even that snake James Carville admitting “Romney came with a chainsaw” [2] and Andrea Sullivan admitting it was a disaster for Obama. [3] The MSNBC morons were in full meltdown mode last night… great comedy television, I tell ya. I forget who it was, but some wonk on Twitter suggested they’d not seen so enthusiastic a beating since Paul Reubens and Fred Willard went to the movies together.
There are those of course who will blame Obama’s overwhelming loss [4] last night on a number of things … he didn’t have his teleprompter [5]…. some will blame his debate coaches [6]… — they’ll blame the moderator [7]… they’ll say Romney bullied his way to more talk time…(Untrue of course… Obama got a total of four minutes more talk time than Romney did.) …and like good Democrats… they’re going to blame everything but what needs to be blamed for the problem. Specifically, the message is the issue. The content.
Look, I don’t care if you’re the best salesman in the world… if what you are selling is radioactive waste, you’re not going to get a line to your door to buy the stuff, no matter how good a job you do. That’s what Obama’s problem was last night. He was faced for the first time with someone willing to make the case that the policies of the left have failed. And, predictably, Obama couldn’t defend against it.
Try as he might… and he did try…he couldn’t make the sale for four more years of failure. But then again, who could? I mean, look, I’ll give him the Bill Clinton defense here. Nobody could have done a better job with what Obama policy left Obama himself to defend.
Oh… and the early polls? Romney picked up about half the respondents [8] of post debate polling, and even those not saying they’re voting for Romney said he won the debate. Credit where it’s due… The Jersey Fat Man got it right [9].
And just think; The Biden Smackdown is only days away. Personally, I”m stocking up on popcorn.
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Addendum:(Eric)
Based on some offline comments, I guess I’d better make this clear;
I’m no huge fan of Romney. He’s not a conservative. Not even close. No conservative would have ever uttered words to the effect that “Regulation is essential. You can’t have a free market work if you don’t have regulation.” You either have a free market or you have a regulated market. Ne’er the twain shall meet.
That said, let’s be honest here… anything to the right of Obama… granted, a huge field… would have defeated Obama. Such was the case last night.