[ Posted Tuesday, October 16th, 2012 – 20:58 UTC ]
Since I brought the subject up, however, I will jump into the "winners/losers" fray and give my snap reaction to what we all just witnessed tonight. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney both brought their "A" game tonight, unlike Obama's first widely-panned performance. Mitt Romney was not appreciably different tonight than the first debate, but Obama certainly had eaten his Wheaties this morning. Or maybe the more up-to-date version is "drank his Red Bull," I really couldn't say. This provided much more lively television, to put it mildly. Actually, "mildly" isn't the right word, since not much of anything about tonight was mild in any way.
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[ Posted Friday, October 12th, 2012 – 16:36 UTC ]
We come to you live from the arena, the day after the vice-presidential debate. The lights are being removed, the podiums are gone, and the cleanup crew is sweeping up the tiny, tiny pieces of Paul Ryan which were left all over the stage last night.
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[ Posted Wednesday, October 10th, 2012 – 17:16 UTC ]
Before tomorrow night, we'll be hearing a whole lot of "vice-presidential debates haven't ever mattered," mostly uttered by the same people who told us, a week ago, that "presidential debates rarely change anything." Since these nattering nabobs of negativism (to use a famous vice-presidential phrase) were wrong before, one has to at least consider that they may be wrong again. Tomorrow's debate may matter a great deal to the voters. The first presidential debate was watched by a jaw-dropping record number of viewers (upwards of 70 million), and it's all anyone's been talking about since in the political world (even the Big Bird stories were tied in to the debate). So perhaps quite a few folks will tune in tomorrow night as well, and perhaps Joe Biden and Paul Ryan may prove to move public opinion this time around.
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[ Posted Friday, October 5th, 2012 – 17:47 UTC ]
The first presidential debate of the 2012 season happened this week, and (it pains us to say) the only person who called the outcome correctly was Chris Christie. Last Sunday, he predicted a "game changer" of a debate, and that we'd all wake up Thursday with a whole new race and a whole new opinion of Mitt Romney. While we rarely agree with Chris Christie about much of anything, we've got to at least hand it to him -- in the midst of the usual pre-debate expectations-lowering game, he went rogue and predicted a big win for his guy, and he turned out to be correct.
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[ Posted Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012 – 20:59 UTC ]
There is a whole lot wrong with the way the media reports debates, on that we can all agree, I think. The overemphasis on who "won" and "lost," for starters. The inevitable boiling-down of ninety minutes into a nine-second soundbite from both candidates (which we'll see everyone agree on by tomorrow morning).
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[ Posted Friday, September 28th, 2012 – 17:28 UTC ]
Unsolicited advice to the Romney campaign: this is not the way to convince voters that your candidate isn't Thurston Howell III. I'm just sayin'....
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[ Posted Tuesday, September 25th, 2012 – 17:11 UTC ]
Are Colorado voters going to pass Amendment 64 in November, which would legalize recreational (not just medicinal) marijuana use for all adults in the state? The bigger question, should this come to pass, is what is the federal government going to do about it?
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[ Posted Friday, September 21st, 2012 – 15:25 UTC ]
Wouldn't it be amusingly ironic if Mitt Romney only managed to get 47 percent of the national popular vote for president? It would renew my faith that the universe has a sense of humor, that's for sure.
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[ Posted Wednesday, September 19th, 2012 – 15:48 UTC ]
Think about it. At the heart of Mitt Romney's new argument is a complete disconnect with the core, unshakeable tenet of the Republican faith -- "lower taxes for all." What Mitt Romney is arguing, when stripped of heated rhetoric, is that it is a bad thing that 47 percent don't pay federal income taxes, and that it would be a good thing if those people actually did pay federal income taxes -- thus arguing for raising taxes on half of the country. There is no way to escape this -- you are either for raising taxes, or you are for lowering taxes. Mitt Romney is now, apparently, for raising taxes on tens of millions of people. He really can't have it both ways.
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[ Posted Friday, September 14th, 2012 – 15:22 UTC ]
The second item of note is that today marks the fifth "birthday" of this column series. September 14, 2007 saw the very first Friday Talking Points column ever (although the name and the column format wouldn't solidify for a few months). Since then, almost every Friday, we've been attempting to provide Democratic talking points for politicians to use to get their point across in a snappy and memorable fashion. How much success we've had doing so is open to interpretation, but we're still here doing it, which tends to indicate that Democrats still have a ways to go to match the Republican ability to keep "on script" during interviews. To put this another way, it's the old Democratic "herding cats" problem.
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