Romney blows it during debate

[Ed W]

Mitt Romney spent Wednesday's debate apparently channeling Al Gore and even going him one better.  Romney didn't merely look wooden.  He appeared to be carved in granite, wearing a gaping, almost demented smile throughout the debate.  His pre-planned 'gotchas' and 'zingers' had been rehearsed since August, and the candidate delivered them with robotic monotony, sometimes without regard to the discussion topic. 

Immediately after the debate, numerous reports of muffled thuds flooded police switchboards as prominent Republican's heads exploded.

(Just remember - you read it here first!)

[guido911]

Mitt Romney spent Wednesday's debate apparently channeling Al Gore and even going him one better.  Romney didn't merely look wooden.  He appeared to be carved in granite, wearing a gaping, almost demented smile throughout the debate.  His pre-planned 'gotchas' and 'zingers' had been rehearsed since August, and the candidate delivered them with robotic monotony, sometimes without regard to the discussion topic.  

Immediately after the debate, numerous reports of muffled thuds flooded police switchboards as prominent Republican's heads exploded.

(Just remember - you read it here first!)

Whew. Don't have to bother watching now (as if I was going to). Thanks.  

[RecycleMichael]

Listening to talk radio and reading facebook posts from friends shows some real upset republicans. They just can't believe they are losing to Obama.

If Romney does poorly in the debates, it is going to get ugly around here.

[nathanm]

I don't think the heads exploding was due to Romney's poor performance, although it was dismal. Their heads exploded because Obama came out as Stalin's great grandson, declared an alliance with Iran and North Korea, announced the bombing of Israel was to begin in five minutes, and unveiled the new 2,000 foot tall minaret at the WTC site. The pictures of Michelle and the kids in matching hijabs is probably what sent the brain hemorrhages into full on explosions, though.

You gotta hand it to him, though. It's one ballsy campaign strategy.

[Red Arrow]

I don't think the heads exploding was due to Romney's poor performance, although it was dismal. Their heads exploded because Obama came out as Stalin's great grandson, declared an alliance with Iran and North Korea, announced the bombing of Israel was to begin in five minutes, and unveiled the new 2,000 foot tall minaret at the WTC site. The pictures of Michelle and the kids in matching hijabs is probably what sent the brain hemorrhages into full on explosions, though.
You gotta hand it to him, though. It's one ballsy campaign strategy.

There are/were (whatever tense you are writing in) more instances of "I told you so" than heads exploding.  Those admissions of the truth from the real Obama will unite the independents and conservatives to overwhelmingly defeat Obama.

[Gaspar]

. . .and people call me clairvoyant.  

It may indeed be a good debate for President Obama.  New videos are surfacing showing he's quite comfortable without a teleprompter.
http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/02/obama-speech-jeremiah-wright-new-orleans

[Red Arrow]

. . .and people call me clairvoyant.  

Clair who?

[Gaspar]

Clair who?

[Hoss]

. . .and people call me clairvoyant.  

It may indeed be a good debate for President Obama.  New videos are surfacing showing he's quite comfortable without a teleprompter.
http://dailycaller.com/2012/10/02/obama-speech-jeremiah-wright-new-orleans

New video?  This has been going around since the last campaign.  Haha!

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/10/tucker-carlson-already-reported-tucker-carlson-exclusive/57539/#

[carltonplace]

Pivot! PIVOT!

[Townsend]

On Eve Of First Debate, NPR Poll Shows Romney Within Striking Distance

http://kwgs.com/post/eve-first-debate-npr-poll-shows-romney-within-striking-distance

The latest poll by NPR and its bipartisan polling team [pdf] shows President Obama with a 7-point lead among likely voters nationally and a nearly identical lead of 6 points in the dozen battleground states where both campaigns are spending most of their time and money.

But the poll also finds former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney very much within striking distance of the incumbent as the two men begin a series of three debates Wednesday in Denver. More than 80 percent of respondents said they planned to watch the first televised clash Wednesday and one in four said the debate could influence their vote.

The poll found 51 percent of the likely voters planning on or leaning toward a vote for the president, with 44 percent voting for or leaning toward his challenger. In the battleground subsample, the numbers were 50 percent Obama and 44 percent Romney. Those numbers were slightly better for the president than his job approval rating in the poll. Nationally, the president was at 50 percent approval (46 percent disapproval), but in the battleground he was at 48 percent approval and 49 percent disapproval.

Battleground voters were also more downbeat about the direction of the country. Asked whether things were generally going in the right direction or "pretty seriously off on the wrong track," 59 percent in the battleground said wrong track and just 36 percent said right direction. That gap of 23 points was only 16 points on the same question in the national sample.

The poll of 800 likely voters was conducted over the final five days of September by Stan Greenberg of Democracy Corps and Whit Ayres of Resurgent Republic. About a third of those polled live in the 12 states considered in play for the Nov. 6 election: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Ayres, the Republican half of the team, noted that the actual electorate in November may not have as many Democrats as this NPR poll's likely voter sample, which he called "a best-case scenario" for the president's party.

"When you sample voters over time, you inevitably get varying proportions of Democrats and Republicans in the sample. It's nothing nefarious, just the vagaries of sampling," Ayres said. "This sample ended up with seven points more Democrats than Republicans. In 2008, there were seven points more Democrats than Republicans in the electorate, according to exit polls. But in 2004, there were equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans."

If this year's voters were to split evenly again between the two major parties, Romney would have an advantage. The NPR poll found him a 4-point favorite among independents.

Most observers expect this year's party ratio to be somewhere between the Democratic tilt of 2008 and the even split of 2004 (which recurred in the midterm elections of 2010). Greenberg, the Democratic member of the polling team, said polling this year has generally found fewer people self-identifying with the GOP.

"They're moving into the independent category," Greenberg said, "where also if you look at the brand position of the Republican Party and Democratic Party, the Republican Party favorability has been dropping throughout this whole period."

But while the ranks of independents are growing, that does not imply a large number of undecided voters with five weeks left to Election Day. The pollsters found only 2 percent calling themselves undecided. Moreover, only 11 percent of the president's supporters and 15 percent of Romney's said they might still change their minds.

"We have a very polarized electorate where people go to their tribal corners and fight it out," Ayres said. "But in an election this close, even a point or two could make a difference."

The poll indicates that the Republican challenger has a tall order to fill Wednesday night and in the remaining weeks, as he has fallen behind on issues such as taxes, the economy and Medicare.

Ayres said that means his party's nominee needs "to paint a compelling picture for a better economic future, and explain why his emphasis on small businesses and private sector solutions is more likely to succeed than Obama's emphasis on governmental and public sector solutions."

Ayres also noted that when his firm tested the statement "Obama's economic plan is working and we need to stay the course" versus the opposing option, "Obama's economic plan is not working and we need to try something different," the latter choice was easily the more popular. But when the statements were altered to emphasize Romney's video quotation about "the 47 percent who don't pay taxes," the results were different.

"That reinforces the argument that Obama cannot win a referendum on his economic record," Ayres added. "The only way he can win is to so thoroughly trash Romney that he becomes an unacceptable alternative."

The NPR poll, like others in recent weeks, showed half the electorate giving Romney an unfavorable personal approval rating. Ayres said that was the other imperative for Romney in the debates: "He needs to come across as knowledgeable and compassionate about people who are hurting in this economy. ... If he does that, then he will help to close this gap."

Democratic pollster Greenberg maintained that efforts to make the election a referendum on the economy had been under way for months and had yet to take hold. Nonetheless, he said, the president cannot afford to sit on his current lead.

"He's got to decide on one thing that he wants to communicate here," Greenberg said. "My guess is he'll want to communicate a presidential — but not arrogant — empathetic style. He's got to focus in a way that seals the deal."

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

[Conan71]

If Romney could just rally the Aryan Brotherhood...

[Gaspar]

If Romney could just rally the Aryan Brotherhood...

[Townsend]

How Politicians Get Away With Dodging The Question

http://www.npr.org/2012/10/03/162103368/how-politicians-get-away-with-dodging-the-question

rett O'Donnell is a debate consultant who trains Republican candidates. He has worked with George W. Bush and John McCain, and for a short time earlier this year, he helped prep Mitt Romney.

O'Donnell is an expert on "the pivot."

If you have watched a debate, you have watched a pivot. "The pivot is a way of taking a question that might be on a specific subject, and moving to answer it on your own terms," O'Donnell says.

Take, as just one small example, a moment from the 2004 debate between President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry.

You could, by the way, just as easily use an example from Kerry — both Bush and Kerry used pivots roughly the same amount of the time.

In this case, the moderator, Bob Schieffer of CBS News, asked President Bush about job loss. What, Schieffer wondered, would Bush say to someone who has lost his job? Bush began by promising to "continue to grow our economy" and then, subtly, changed course. Suddenly, Bush was talking about education, specifically his signature No Child Left Behind legislation. "I went to Washington to solve problems," he explained. "And I saw a problem in the public education system."

In two or three sentences, Bush had moved from a question about lack of jobs to an answer about education and a promise fulfilled. That is the power of the pivot. Which is why, in the age of debate coaches like O'Donnell, candidates in both parties use them all the time — "frequently," O'Donnell says, "better than 60 or 70 percent of the time, I would say."

The question is, how good are viewers at identifying these "pivots" — or, in the language of my people (journalists who ask questions), "dodges"?

How good are you?

There's a man at Harvard who actually has an answer to that question.

The Pivot And The Brain

Todd Rogers, a behavioral psychologist at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, got interested in looking at pivots, or dodges, or whatever you want to call them, after watching the 2004 Bush-Kerry debate I quoted earlier.

To him, the dodging on both sides of that debate was enraging, and he couldn't understand why others didn't feel the same.

To figure it out, he decided to do a study that tried to replicate what typical viewers see when they watch a debate.

He recorded a moderator asking candidates a series of questions.

In the first question, the moderator asked the candidates about health care in America, and the politician answered with a health care answer — a long disquisition on why Americans could not afford the care they needed.

Rogers then took that answer and used it as a response to a totally different moderator question, this one about the problem of illegal drug use. So one set of people saw a candidate answering a health care question with a health care answer, while another group saw an illegal-drug use question answered with a health care answer. Essentially, the second group saw a relatively subtle pivot, from drug use question to health care answer.

Finally, he had a third group view the moderator asking a question about terrorism, which was answered again with the exact same health care answer — a much more blatant shift.

At the end of this he asked the different groups two things:

Can you remember what question the person was asked?

How honest, likable and trustworthy is this person?

'Exploiting Our Cognitive Limitation'

What he found was that when a politician answered the health care question with a health care answer, viewers could recall the question and thought the candidate was likable, honest and trustworthy.

When the politician pivoted a little bit and answered the illegal drug question with a health care answer, viewers could not recall the question — but they didn't penalize the politician at all. "Listeners thought he was just as honest, trustworthy and likable as the guy who actually answered the question," Rogers says.

It was only when the politician answered the terrorism question with a health care answer that people could actually tell. "Everyone noticed, and they thought he was a jerk," Rogers says.

This led Rogers to the conclusion that people are capable of detecting dodges — but only if they're egregious. They don't seem capable of detecting subtle evasions.

Rogers believes this is because we have limited attention, and most of the time when we're watching debates, we spend that attention on social evaluation — Do we like this person? Do we trust this person? — and only generally monitor content.

It's only when the speaker is wildly inconsistent that some deep mental wire is tripped. "It raises some flags, and we direct our limited attention to assessing whether this person is doing something unusual by failing to answer the question and offering an egregiously different answer," Rogers says.

This, Rogers believes, is why politicians can get away with dodging questions as much as 70 percent of the time.

"Politicians," he says, "are exploiting our cognitive limitation without punishment."

[Gaspar]

How Politicians Get Away With Dodging The Question

http://www.npr.org/2012/10/03/162103368/how-politicians-get-away-with-dodging-the-question

President Obama does this with 12 minute answers to simple questions.  On CNN this morning they were talking about how difficult the debates may be for President Obama because he is limited to only a couple of minutes for an answer.  This has always been a problem for him going back to the 2008 election.  When he doen't have an answer he will talk until people get tired of listening, and sometimes people even think he has answered their question.  That, or they faint.  Whichever comes first. He doen't like to answer anything that he doesn't already have prepared remarks or a 2,500 word stump speech for.

I think this is one of the reasons that many in the media complained that he never stopped campaigning all through his first term.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/04/obamas-17-minute-12-second-answer-on-taxes/1#.UGxZ2_l25hY
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/04/06/obamas_17-minute_non-answer_answer_105059.html
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/04/04/wapo-headline-obamas-17-minute-2-500-word-response-womans-claim-being
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/08/20/obama_dodges_question_on_rising_health_care_costs_for_military.html
http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/06/obama-dodges-reporters-questions-solicits-them-from-political-donors/