Poodlehead

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Minneapolis, MN

RedCatWaves

"Good" being the operative word. Rotsa ruck finding one of those. Most libertarians are anti-civil-rights, because they don't think Johnson's 1968 Civil Rights Act was legal and Rosa Parks had no right to sit at that lunch counter if the proprieter didn't want her there.

I once voted for an independant...Ross Perot. All he did was split the vote. He wasted *my* vote. Ralph Nader helped propel Bush into his second term by splitting the vote as an independant. I'm too burned to ever vote for another one if it will dampen the chances of the least-worst other candidates.

LoloDSM

I fall into camp #1. I've always voted Democratic, but I would, and want to vote for a moderate Republican. I would vote for a socially liberal, fiscal conservative. I decided against Romney when he picked Ryan as his running mate. That told me he doesn't give a sh*t about my vote.

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No silicones/no sulfates since March 2008

RedCatWaves

I thought this was a very interesting commentary on Obama's performance last night:

sew and sew

Wow, seriously?

There is just NO way he didn't have racist intentions in making that point and mentioning "my boys" in the process?

Most people didn't take it how you did because they're not sensitive enough to see it. It can't be that most people didn't notice it that way because it very likely was not at all intended that way?

It's an insidious charge to lay up against someone so boldly yet close-mindedly.

Is out of the realm of possibility he meant it how it phased you? Nope.

And that's the rational way to look at it. Not....that's how he meant with 100% certainty, thus he's unquestionably guilty of being a grade A racist ass**** on account of that remark.

If you notice, in your list of incentive for him to mean it that way, you have it hemmed up erring on the extreme opposite side of the 'benefit of the doubt.'

You recognize that he has "plausible deniability" but only in a nefarious sense. You know this, I take it, because you're inside his head. You're making the suspect fit the "crime."

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“It was only a sunny smile and little it cost in the giving but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

RedCatWaves

Of course I can't prove he meant his comment in a racist way. That's how plausible deniability works. This is not a court, and you are not the jury, judging whether my testimony is true or false. I'm merely giving my opinion...which is what these message boards are for.

I'll give some more opinions...

Do I think Romney is a racist? No.

Do I think he's been playing race-politics? Oh yes.

ss40

Honestly Mitt has said worse...
"no one has asked to see my birth certificate"

"All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it."

"I'm running for office, for Pete's sake, I can't have illegals."

"So, Mr. President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago."

"had [my father] been born of Mexican parents, I'd have a better shot of winning this."

Now that you mention it there's nothing remotely racist in his tone, words, or anything else. I'll keep giving him the benefit of the doubt until he walks up to me & spits in my face.

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CocoT

I love him. He's awesome.


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wild~hair

They do this format every cycle. Going way back to Clinton, as far as I can recall, they've been doing this series of four debates: traditional moderated, VP-moderated, town hall, moderated again.

I think it would serve him very well. This kind of stuff isn't supposed to be clear to everyone. That's the way it works. Have you heard of the "nobody likes Mondays" thing? It's code. It's been that way for centuries.

Does that make people sometimes see racial slurs that aren't there? Of course. But I think ss40's list of things Romney has said that are worse is pretty telling. Mittens is not above making cracks exploiting the inherent racism in our culture.

coilynapp

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!

Is there a RCW cloning machine?

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curlyarca

Yes, that would be confirmation of legitimate racism.

I would prefer to give Romney the benefit of a doubt. But that is definitely gone after all the stuff he's said in this campaign. And that's not even considering the alleged assault of that kid at private school.

Now he's saying he didn't mean what he said about the 47%. After sticking by his comments. And you know what? People are LINED UP waiting to forgive him, even if he DID direct his comments at them...basically called them parasites! Because he didn't actually mean it that way, no! Not at all:

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com...ong/?hpt=hp_t1

Incredible. To steal from SuburbanBushBabes' comments I recall from years ago: republicans spin like tops.

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curlyarca

When I heard they put the PA issue on what is essentially suspension, I was pretty pleased.



I know, I know. Everything is about racism with those people.<insert eyeroll here>

Maybe I'm just ultra-sensitive because I took a cultural sensitivity class this week.

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iroc

That's interesting. There were times when Romney was speaking and it looked like the POTUS was going to explode with a retort. So I am interested in how further debates play out.


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Poodlehead

Wait, what does "nobody likes Mondays" really mean? I just thought it meant nobody likes Mondays.

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Minneapolis, MN

ss40

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2012/08/0...ay-racial-slur


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asugirl

I would not be surprised a bit if our Pres was employing this tactic. Definitely risky, because I don't believe that enough people are observant enough to catch all the nuances, but I think Obama is sly like a fox that way. Most people only see the overt, but he has the cunning and intellect to be able to pull it off if enough independents are noticing. I just don't trust much of the voting public.

ss40

Just so the undecided voters know. The unemployment rate is now below 8%. Its 7.8%. I'm curious about the impact of this number on the election.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...747630398.html

Every teardrop is a waterfall

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Josephine

So I'm not crazy then. I knew Obama was playing along. He's way too smart. And the smiles and expressions he made gave it away. Like you really want to say something and you think the other person is a straight up idiot but you just don't.

When I heard Romney compare Obama to his boys I was highly offended and couldn't believe he said that. I didn't think of the racial undertones until now.

I still don't think it's gonna be close. I'll be surprised if it is.

Poodlehead

I suspect this New Yorker article is closer to the truth than the Obama--was-just-playing-Romney view.

Obama’s Old Friends React to the Debate

When Barack Obama was a student at Harvard Law School, he was never known as a particularly good debater. In class, if he thought that a fellow student had said something foolish, he showed no forensic bloodlust. He did not go out of his way to defeat someone in argument; instead he tried, always with a certain decorous courtesy, to try to persuade, to reframe his interlocutor’s view, to signal his understanding while disagreeing. Obama became president of the law review—the first African-American to do so—but he won as a voice of conciliation. He avoided the Ames Moot Court Competition, where near contemporaries like Cass Sunstein, Deval Patrick, and Kathleen Sullivan made their names.
Laurence H. Tribe, a leading constitutional-law scholar and Obama’s mentor at Harvard, told me after Wednesday night’s debate with Mitt Romney, “Although I would have been happier with a more aggressive debate performance by the President, I’ve had to remind myself that Barack Obama’s instincts and talents have never included going for an opponent’s jugular. That’s just not who he is or ever has been.”
Some of Obama’s old friends from Harvard and from his early days as an organizer and as a neophyte politician in Chicago were disappointed that Obama so clearly lost the debate—at least on the level of sheer performance if not substance—but the tone of that performance did not come entirely as a shock.
Christopher Edley, Jr., who also taught Obama at Harvard, served as an informal adviser, and is now dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, laughed when I asked him if he was disappointed by the President’s strangely absent demeanor and pedagogical answers. “I’m a professor and he was a professor: What’s the problem?!” he said. “I usually don’t treat being professorial as a problem. It’s usually great in my book, but he played in that particular comfort zone of his and it was a mismatch for the occasion. I’ve been in too many debate-prep sessions to count with Presidential candidates—I worked with Dukakis, Gore, Dean, and Obama, in 2008—and there are some basics that the President just didn’t check off. Most glaringly, for starters, he failed to look into the camera for his closing statement.
“The reason I hate campaigns,” Edley continued, “is that being right on the substance isn’t good enough. That’s why I’m an academic. Of course, Obama knows that, but it’s also a question of what he cares about. I admire him for caring more about the substance than the tactics even if it makes me grimace when I watch him. Why does he do it? Look, we all do things in the short term that are not consistent with a long-term goal, whether it’s failing to save for retirement or watching TV instead of doing your homework. It’s called being human rather than being the ideal client of your handlers. It makes it harder to achieve his goal, which is to get reëlected. But if you wanted authenticity you got it [on Wednesday] night. And, really, you got it in an unsurprising way. We know that Obama skews cerebral and that he has never liked debates as a way to engage issues. He has said that many times.”
Obama’s friends from his days as a community organizer on Chicago’s South Side and his first campaigns in the city concentrated less on his forensic shortcomings; they were more frustrated with what they saw as Romney’s capacity to get away with inconsistencies and worse.
Will Burns, a Chicago alderman, who, as a student, worked for Obama in his (successful) 1996 campaign for the Illinois State Senate and his (unsuccessful) 2000 campaign for Congress, said that the format was too “loosey-goosey” for Obama, who failed to get aggressive with Romney.
“The President has always been someone who takes the truth seriously and has a great faith in the American people and their ability to handle big ideas,” Burns said. “He doesn’t patronize them. He uses the campaign as an educative process. He wants to win but also wants to be clear about his ideas…. He took complex ideas like Medicare and the debt and tried to explain it to people so they can understand them while at the same time not being patronizing. And he is doing this with an opponent who is completely dissembling on every issue! There is a certain brazenness about Romney. It’s like [Stephen] Colbert talking about ‘truthiness.’ Romney stood there, with his hair and his jaw and his terrific angles—and he lied! About taxes, about Medicare. Obama pushed back on the five-trillion-dollar tax cut or the way Romney’s version of Medicare would destroy Medicare as we know it. And Romney just tilted his head and said, Oh, no, it won’t. At some point, you have to believe that the facts speak for themselves.”
Burns recalled that when Obama ran for Congress against the incumbent Bobby Rush and a fellow state senator Donnie Trotter, he would often find the debates frustrating, even absurd. “Obama always tried to keep his cool,” Burns said. “I sensed that last night. He was trying to keep his cool.”
Maybe so, said the Reverend Alvin Love, of the Lilydale First Baptist Church, on the South Side, “but I thought the President was a little laid back. Romney was really aggressive, even overly aggressive and got away with some stuff. The President stuck to the issues and took great pains to explain his positions and sometimes that can come off, in that setting, as a little cold. I thought he held his own but I guess when you get into that first debate, you want your guy to blow the competition away, and that didn’t happen.”
Reverend Love grew close to Obama when Obama was a community organizer. He could tell that Obama was never particularly comfortable in the debate format. “He’s better out there by himself,” he said. “His personality has always been kind of contemplative. In that kind of format, when you are contemplative, it makes you seem not as quick on the draw.”
Johnnie Owens, one of Obama’s fellow organizers on the South Side, told me, “I’ve seen him better. Some people said he came off flat and he did. He did his best, but a number of times when Romney was asked, Barack kept his head down too long and it made it look as if he didn’t want to deal with what Romney was saying, as if he was reading something. It would have looked better if he had lifted his head up and looked Romney in the eye.
“The job of being President,” Owens went on, “you can see it in his face—that level of seriousness, having to do what he does, and then go debate. His hair has gotten grayer so quickly! Mine, too, but for him it’s almost overnight. You can really sense the stress on him.”

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ss40

I think at the end of the day Mitt showed us more of his tail. He wants to be seen as a smart guy. Obama let him talk. At the end of the day you can't win a debate via fallacies & contradictions. That town hall debate will show you Obama in his comfort zone, talking directly to constituents. Mitt Romney wants to be liked. That's his angle. Obama wants to be credible & he is. If you recall the catty attitude Hillary displayed when debating Obama in the 2008 primaries, it turned voters off. But when the 3am call came Obama proved himself (in the middle of the birther BS, he pulled out Bin Laden's head). Mitt used the same catty tactic & he will pay for it when credibility is called into question.

Every teardrop is a waterfall

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