The quality of American election debates for the presidency has deteriorated. Watching the first hour of the Obama versus Romney debate last night was like watching kids in the school yard argue with each other. Whoever helped prepare these two men should be ashamed. The candidates argued, smirked, ranted and, much of the time, were incomprehensible to the audience.
The only time that anyone made any sense was when Romney complained that a gallon of gas that cost $1.86 just over four years ago, now cost over $4. The comment was gold. All Obama needed to do was to handle it properly. Mitt Romney, true to form, blamed it all on Barrack Obama. And then Obama bumbled it. He had the perfect opportunity to build a scenario starting with Hurricane Katrina (on George W. Bush’s watch) disabling much of America’s refining capacity and how the oil companies have taken advantage of the situation every since.
As in most of their childish arguing, you realized that they were arguing from different sets of facts. Romney, for example, always included Canadian tar sands oil in his U.S. energy efficiency statistics. This must be because he wants to make sure that the Trans-Canada Keystone XL Pipeline will be built. Obama never includes this bitumen crude in his figures because whomever gave him his statistics knows that the Alberta oil people want to use the East Texas oil ports to ship that crude around the world.
We hear that the second half of the show was no better than the first. And wherever they got that moderator from, they should return her for a refund. She crapped all over the candidates as though she had never seen a Yankee town hall meeting. Any resemblance to a properly run meeting by a neutral chairperson was purely coincidental.
At least Obama did not laugh and mug for the cameras like his running mate. Yet despite how poorly he performed, Romney must have been worse. We hear that Obama won the debate. Why is that do you think? Was it his turn?
Maybe Obama was not as reticent to mix it up with Romney this time.
But, good grief, somebody has to tell him not to try to explain costs in trillions of dollars. He has enough trouble explaining the inflationary impact on the cost of a gallon of gas caused by the world economic crisis. Even when you consider that an American trillion is only a thousand billion, it is no help whatsoever in trying to understand today’s price of a loaf of bread.
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Copyright 2012 © Peter Lowry
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