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16%
Of social networking site users say they have changed their views about a political issue after discussing it or reading posts about it on the sites.
+4,000
President Obama’s campaign sponsored more than 4,000 watch parties across the country for last night’s first presidential debate, USA Today reports. In contrast, Mitt Romney’s campaign said it had 336 watch party events in a dozen battleground states.
No, don’t boo, he’s the best thing we’ve got going, guys.
— Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), referring to Vice President Joe Biden’s statement that the middle class has been “buried” in the past four years.
I never would have guessed that you could go 90 minutes and not hear about the ’47 percent’ comment.
— Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), quoted by the Washington Examiner, on last night’s presidential debate.
Romney won the debate in no small part because he adopted a policy of simply lying about his policies. Probably the best way to understand Obama’s listless performance is that he was prepared to debate the claims Romney has been making for the entire campaign, and Romney switched up and started making different and utterly bogus ones. Obama, perhaps, was not prepared for that, and he certainly didn’t think quickly enough on his feet to adjust to it.
— Jonathan Chait, in New York Magazine, asserting that Mitt Romney’s two biggest pivots to the center in last night’s debate were not true by his own campaign’s admission. Think Progress says Romney misled viewers 27 times last night.
A white woman voting for Barack Obama is like a black woman voting for the KKK.
— John Hawkins (@johnhawkinsrwn), in a post on his blog RightWingNews.com Oct. 3, 2012. Hawkins is a regular contributor to Mitt Romney’s campaign website.
The press is doing to Romney the same thing it did to John Kerry, and to Al Gore before him: Covering him as a loser. A weird loser. A distant loser, who is ‘uncomfortable in his own skin’ and ‘failing to connect’ with ‘regular voters.’ The contempt and pity for him as a candidate is almost palpable, and each moment in the campaign is distorted imperceptibly, as if by magnetism, to reinforce the Romney caricature. This is how we got a flurry of stories, for instance, about how Romney doesn’t know why airplane windows don’t roll down.
— John Cook, writing on Gawker.
This last weekend, Paul Ryan repeatedly dodged questions about the mathematical impossibility of the tax plan he and Mitt Romney are running on, and then, having burned through seven repeated questions and two minutes of dodging, insisted he couldn’t answer because the math would take too long. Today Bloomberg News spoke to Ryan and promised he could have all the time he wanted to get into the math. Guess what? He still didn’t. Rather than try to reconcile his irreconcilable promises, Ryan dissembled his way through another interview.
—Jonathan Chait, writing in New York Magazine.
Seventy percent of Americans want the American dream. They believe in the American idea. Only 30 percent want their welfare state. Before too long, we could become a society where the net majority of Americans are takers, not makers.
— Republican vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan, in remarks he made in November 2011.
8 in 10
Americans in a USA Today poll say there’s nothing either candidate could say or do in the debates that would change their minds about their vote. Still, one in five say the debates could sway them — including 24% of Obama supporters and 18% of Romney supporters.
