The Guv vs. the Prez

Each side got what they look for in a leader tonight at the first presidential debate of the season. Republicans want someone who's bold, confident bordering on aggressive, with simple, clear-cut answers to complex questions. Democrats want a Community Organizer in Chief who's sensitive to ordinary people's needs and proposes solutions to problems that are as complex as the complexity of the problems require.

Both got what they wanted.

But the question is, what did the 7% undecideds want to see? As the President pointed out several times, the Governor's bold, clear proposals and answers were devoid of any specifics that might upset different special interests.

The biggest problem is that the Governor's economic plan's figures don't add up. You can't add $7 trillion to the deficit (via tax cuts favoring the rich and added military spending) without cutting $7 trillion from the government's operating expenses--and there aren't $7 trillion to be cut if you exempt military-related spending. The numbers simply don't add up, as the fact check organizations keep pointing out.

One other thing: the ruthless CEO "you're on yer own pal" Romney of the GOP convention Etch-a-Sketched himself into the moderate "works with both sides" Romney of the Massachusetts governorship for this debate.

I think his far-right supporters will generally go along with this, because they know that whatever he says in debates to placate centrists, when a Republican-dominated Congress sends him a radical right wing bill to sign, he'll sign it. Because it seems that he's neither a centrist nor a hard-right guy: he's a "whatever it takes to get me to the White House, and hold on to it for a second term" guy. This isn't mind reading--it's simply the only plausible explanation for his vast political mood swings over the past four years. Swings that continue to go on, sometimes daily.

Because he doesn't really want to be America's president--he wants to be America's CEO. That's a great thing to many, but it's quite a rethinking of the role of the President of the United States, and its previous practitioners (notably Herbert Hoover) don't augur well for this model.

If I were the President, I'd have asked Romney whether he'd sign some of the radical bills the Republican House has passed--and whether he'd also sign a pledge not to benefit personally from any changes in the tax code during or after his presidency, so at to avoid not just sin, but the appearance of sin. That's a key Mormon principle BTW.

EDIT ADD:
You can read Politifact's factcheck of this debate here, and FactCheck.org's factcheck here.  Both the Guv and the Prez strayed from Truthville pretty frequently, though often with half-truths, but just as the Guv won the debate from a testosterone standpoint, he also won the Most Lies Told competition.

However, that may not be a problem for most of his supporters, since the New Republican Party appears to have embraced the Islamic principle of Taqiyyah, which justifies saying anything to an Infidel if it advances the faith.

I watched the Fox News "analysis" afterwards, and what interested me wasn't the glossing over of factual misrepresentations but how much of the discussion centered on describing how manly Governor Romney was and what a Girly Man President Obama was, using boxing metaphors frequently.

They did not discuss the fact that the so-called Liberal Media gave Governor Romney credit for his dominating performance--they'd predicted the Liberal Media would declare the Prez the winner regardless of what actually happened. More Taquiyyah?

Needless to say, fact checking did not happen on Fox's post-debate "analysis." Just Our Guy Good Their Guy Bad discourse that went on for hours.