Why “Obama is best choice for president”:
Obama is not always as gregarious as many Americans might like him to be, but he is committed to his country and candid with it — to the point of releasing far more of his tax returns than Romney. While Obama commits the occasional gaffe, we can’t imagine him ever dismissing 47 percent of his fellow Americans — as Romney did, and later apologized for doing.
Why Romney-Ryan ticket is scary:
The scariest part of a Romney victory is the potential that he and Paul Ryan would attempt to shape the U.S. Supreme Court to match their religious and political beliefs, including opposition to abortion. As Ryan made clear in the debate Thursday, “Our faith informs us in everything we do.” That could mean Romney would appoint justices who oppose abortion and gay marriage, even though Republicans normally pledge to “get government out of people’s lives.”
Hendrik Hertzberg on “Biden, Literally Uniliterally“:
I’m sure that plenty of people were put off by the Vice-President’s facial antics—the patronizing grins, the mock exasperation, the silent giggles. I was a little put off myself, at first. But as he went along, he managed to earn a right to be what you might call cheerfully contemptuous.
Matt Taibbi on the Vice Presidential Debate:
The proper way to report such a tactic is to bring to your coverage exactly the feeling that Biden brought to the debate last night: contempt and amazement. We in the press should be offended by what Romney and Ryan are doing – we should take professional offense that any politician would try to whisk such a gigantic lie past us to our audiences, and we should take patriotic offense that anyone is trying to seize the White House using such transparently childish and dishonest tactics.
I actually felt bad for Paul Ryan in last night debate as if a little boy was getting his ass whipped by his parents. Joe Biden appeared to be teaching his son some maths. “It’s mathematically impossible,” he responded to Romney-Ryan’s five-trillion-dollar income-tax cut. When Martha Raddatz pressed Ryan for specifics of how he could pay for his tax cuts, Ryan couldn’t give one. Mad props to Ms. Raddatz for an outstanding job of moderating the debate.
Hendrik Hertzberg on “The Ungreat Debate“:
By the end of the ninety minutes, Romney had retrofitted himself as the defender of Medicare, the advocate of Wall Street regulation, the scourge of the big banks, the enemy of tax cuts for the rich, and the champion of tax relief for the middle class. All these claims are spectacularly false; all went entirely, or mostly, unrefuted.
Also read: “Mitt Romney-The 767 Lyin’ King“
Two days after the debate and I still am puzzling why Obama performed so bad. He was outstanding against John McCain four years ago even though he lacked the experience. With four years in the White House, I expected words just rolled off his tongue. He couldn’t have fumbled that bad against a flip flopper. Then it hit me. It has to be his strategic move to let his opponent have the first round. The next two debates, he’s going to make a comeback and to win both as well as the election.
I can’t wait to say, “I told you so.”
What Mr. Romney did in the debate, in other words, was, at best, to play a word game with voters, pretending to offer something substantive for the uninsured while actually offering nothing. For all practical purposes, he simply lied about what his policy proposals would do.
When the tape leaked, he was completely behind his comment on the 47%. Now he is completely wrong. I am actually not surprised.
Virtually every time Mr. Romney spoke, he misrepresented the platform on which he and Paul Ryan are actually running. The most prominent example, taking up the first half-hour of the debate, was on taxes. Mr. Romney claimed, against considerable evidence, that he had no intention of cutting taxes on the rich or enacting a tax cut that would increase the deficit.
See also: At Last Night’s Debate: Romney Told 27 Myths In 38 Minutes