Category: Mason Speaks

President Barack Obama held a campaign event at George Mason University Friday, marking his second visit to GMU this month.  Mason Votes was there to cover all angles of his visit. His remarks pleased the partisan crowd, but I doubt they will do much to persuade independents or undecided voters with less than three weeks left in the race.

Obama began by calling Mitt Romney’s five-point plan to create 12 million jobs, “a sketchy deal” and quoted the New York Times’ opinion that it was a “snow job on the American people.”  Obama said that Romney’s plan really only has one point, “that those at the very top play by a different set of rules.”

Now with rhetoric like that, you might think Romney’s plan only cuts taxes for the rich.  You may think Romney really wants to stick it to the middle class.  In reality, the only person shoveling anything is Barack Obama, and it isn’t snow.  Romney has campaigned on a 20% tax cut across the board and then capping the number of deductions and exemptions the rich can take.  This would assure that the rich still paid the same share of the tax burden, while lowering the rate for the vast majority of Americans.  So Obama has set up and has been consistently attacking a Romney straw man argument.  He ridicules the tax plan he wants Romney to have, not the one he actually has.

The President did have one new attack line for this rally.  He coined the term, “Romnesia”.  Obama claimed that Romney had been avoiding his prior positions and thus called it a “condition he’s going through”.  That ended up being the big headline out of the rally, Obama’s clever new attack line.

Beyond that term’s small dose of immaturity, what’s more striking is what the speech generally left until the very end, his actual second term agenda.  He ran down a litany of points at the end of his remarks.  The term I caught on to was “invest”.  Obama said he’s going to “invest” in education, clean energy, roads, etc.  What he won’t tell you is that when he says he will “invest”, it means you will have to pay.  And there are not enough rich people in America for him to tax in order to balance that equation.  He attacks Romney for not having specifics, but he never has told the American people how he’ll pay for all these new “investments”.  The answer isn’t hard to discern.  What he’ll do in a second term is exactly what he did in his first, which is put it on our children’s credit card in the form of debt.  If Barack Obama is reelected, the national debt will hit $20 trillion, guaranteed.

In the end, the Obama campaign needs boosted turnout among his voters in Northern Virginia to offset the Romney vote down south.  That’s why he is mobilizing the largest college in NoVa in person, twice.  But he can come a dozen times and it still won’t change the fact that there are 23 million unemployed Americans being ignored by his campaign rhetoric.  Higher gas and food prices being ignored.  The lowest household income and take-home pay in a decade is being ignored.  Those are issues central to this campaign, and it’s why Obama is in trouble and in real danger of being the first President in 20 years to not win a second term.

 *The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author. 

** Photo by Curtis Kalin.

Well the verdict is in: The President did show up tonight.  But as opposed to the empty chair President Obama featured in the first debate, this time it was the truth that was often times missing from his performance.

In terms of style, Mitt Romney did not change all that much from debate one.  He still vigorously went after Obama’s record and repeated one of his main lines that, “we don’t have to settle for this.”  The big change was the demeanor of the President.  He definitely had the fire and had what seemed like a rhetorical bloodlust for Romney all night.  Every answer featured an attack on Romney’s personal finances or his record.  He wasn’t as outwardly rude as Vice President Biden was, but he still poked his way into Romney’s answers.

The questions were from uncommitted voters from New York State and mainly dealt with the economy and domestic issues.  Obama attacked Romney for saying that Detroit should “go bankrupt.”  However, it was the President that actually let the auto companies go bankrupt and then rebuild.  The President assailed Romney as having a one-point plan for the economy, which was based around helping the wealthy.  Again, that might be what Obama wants to think Romney’s plan is, but Romney actually centers the plan on the middle class and broad economic growth.

One of the first angry exchanges of the night was about gas prices.  Romney attacked Obama for not allowing drilling and new pipelines, while Obama asserted that it was the recession that began under President Bush that was to blame for the price of gas fluctuating.   When talking coal and natural gas, Romney attacked Obama by telling him, “I don’t think anyone believes that you will fight for oil, coal, and natural gas.”

On taxes, Obama again went after Romney for being too nice to the top wage earners.  As much as Romney keeps saying the rich won’t pay less, Obama keeps hammering the point.  Especially in this section, it seemed President Obama’s only response to the Romney plan was to call it untrue.  Beyond that he never said why cutting taxes would, in his mind, be a bad thing for the economy.  His plan would raise taxes on the wealthy even though it’s mathematically impossible to pay for all of the President’s new spending while only taxing the rich.  The question needs to be asked, who else will the President have to tax?  I wouldn’t mind hearing some specifics on that.

After that there were a series of questions that really were right up Obama’s alley.  Questions on equal pay, contraception, and how Romney compared with President Bush all fit into the Obama campaign’s own attack lines against Romney. That he’s anti-woman or that he’s the same old Republican.  The President also had a four-minute edge in total time for the night.

The last big exchange was on the terrorist attack in Libya that killed four Americans including Ambassador Chris Stevens.  Romney attacked Obama for mishandling the aftermath and giving out false information to the press in the week following the attack.  The administration’s claim that the attack was a protest, and not a terrorist act was the point Romney hammered home.  Obama was indignant on this and accused Romney of playing politics with dead Americans. It seemed that moment was when Obama was at his most animated and almost visibly angry.

Overall, my partisan opinion would be that Romney continued a well-oiled prosecution of the Obama record.  However, based on Obama’s resurgence and actually showing he possessed a pulse, I think I’d honestly call the debate a draw.  Both men did what they needed to do to energize their respective bases.  Going into the final debate next Monday, both men seemed more eager and more fervent in their ambition to win this race.

*The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.