Ezra Klein and leading economist do a masterful job of debunking the latest GOP conspiracy theory... "The Jobers."
Having lost his leading stump speech talking point of unemployment being above 8% for over forty months, Romney seized on the "more people have stopped looking for work" which also has been debunked!
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So Obama has officially brought the country back to where it was when he was first sworn in... and that is the death of Romney's second talking point... "Obama's policies have made the situation worse."
Sadly the MSNBC servers on this segment were having problems and right after the President speaks there is an audio drop out and one minute of black before the show continues, but the rest is good and debunks the whole "Jobs Truther" arguments that FOX is putting out there.
One very interesting point that comes up at the end is why Obama has not been pushing his American Jobs Act. That is a question that has bothered me too.
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The "Jobs Birthers" are going to lay this on thick in the days to come as it has taken over the news cycle and has the possibility of blunting President Obama's dismal debate performance.
Nate Sliver's 538 blog reports that there has been a Romney shift in the swing states and in one of the national polls, but it is too early to tell if the Romney bounce will last or the jobs numbers will kill it.
Oct. 5: Day After Debate, Strong Swing State Polls for Romney
By NATE SILVER
On Friday, Mitt Romney had his best day in state-level polling since at least the party conventions, something that very probably reflects improvement in his standing following the presidential debate in Denver on Wednesday.
Two automated polling firms, Rasmussen Reports and We Ask America, released polls in Ohio, Florida and Virginia on Friday. All of these polls were conducted on Thursday, the day after the Denver debate.
In the Rasmussen Reports polls, Mr. Romney trailed Barack Obama by 1 point in Ohio. But he led him by 1 point in Virginia and by 2 points in Florida.
Snip!
So it’s hard to distinguish a genuine shift toward Mr. Romney, from a real but potentially temporary shift based on changes in voter enthusiasm, from an artificial change caused by a bias toward heavy news consumers.
But now there’s another complication: the government reported a strong jobs report on Friday, which changed the tone of the news cycle. To the extent that the polls reflected people’s reaction to the news coverage of the debate as much as the debate itself, the jobs report could blunt some of Mr. Romney’s momentum if the tenor of news coverage changes.
The FiveThirtyEight forecast did show a clear shift toward Mr. Romney on Friday, giving him a 15.1 percent chance of winning the Electoral College — up from 12.9 percent on Thursday.
Lots more at the link:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/
I'm not excusing Obama's poor debate performance but it is clear that he came equipped with counter arguments to the Mitt Romney we had seen on the campaign trail for over a year. In the debate, however, we saw Mitt Romney's real etch-a-sketch moment... and contradicting all of his previous espoused policies.
Klein and company do a great analysis of "The Birth of Moderate Mit."
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Yeah... Make Over Mitt caught Obama off-guard and flat footed, but Romney could only do this once without sounding like Monty Python's skit "You came here for an argument."
The Biden debate will also be pivotal for the campaign and the pundits are saying that this may be the most watched Vice President debate in election history. That may be hype but I have the feeling that after the Presidential debate they may be right.