The current strategy by the Obama campaign to combat the weak performance of their candidate in the debate this past week is to call Mitt Romney a liar. Had Mr. Romney or his campaign minions been making the Sunday talk show rounds calling the president a liar the press would be horrified; not so with the left-wing media’s double-standard.
Obama campaign senior adviser Robert Gibbs said that Mr. Romney’s performance was “masterful, theatrical” but promised that in the next debate President Obama would bring his “A-game.”
“I think you’re going to see a very engaged president that is ready and willing to call out whichever Mitt Romney that shows up,” Gibbs said on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press.”
“I’m not going to take away from Mitt’s masterful, theatrical performance. He did a superb acting job. He did everything but learn tap-dance.”
While ex-Vice President Al Gore concluded that Mr. Obama’s performance was due to the president not being acclimated to the altitude in Denver, the rest of the Democrats argued that the president was shocked by Mr. Romney’s dishonesty.
Republicans attributed the Democratic response as sour grapes as they continued to contrast Mr. Romney’s energetic debate presence with Mr. Obama’s lackluster defense of his first term as president.
“Gov. Romney laid out a plan for turning this economy around, getting things moving again; he had a fact-based critique of President Obama’s failed policies that the president was not able to respond to,” said Romney senior adviser Ed Gillespie on ABC-TV’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.”
“Since then, the Obama campaign, they remind me a little of a 7-year-old losing a checker game and instead of being frustrated at the outcome, they sweep the board off the table,” Mr. Gillespie said.
Democrats have said that Mr. Romney’s proposed tax plan will add to the federal deficit by eliminating $5 trillion in tax revenue over a decade, a figure that Mr. Romney disputed during the debate.
The argument made by the Democrats is completely disingenuous; they’ve stacked the deck by assuming the current Bush tax cuts remain in place without any reduction in high-income earner’s deductions and zero job growth to arrive at the $5 trillion number.
Obama campaign manager David Axelrod called Mr. Romney “dishonest” on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation,” while Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen on “Meet the Press” said, “Either Mitt Romney is completely faking everything he said, or he is a liar.”
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich dismissed the Democratic tax-cut claims, calling them “just plain wrong,” adding that Mr. Obama had plenty of opportunity to engage the Republican nominee on that point during the debate.
“The President of the United States had 90 minutes. Now if he had done his homework, if he’d actually prepared, if he’d actually studied Romney, why didn’t he say that?” Mr. Gingrich said on “Meet the Press.” “Why didn’t he take Romney head on?”
Democrats cited the September jobs report, released Friday, as evidence that the president’s economic plan is working. The report found unemployment dipping below 8 percent for the first time in 43 months.
In politics you pick the information you wish to reveal and this week the Democrats were boasting about the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment numbers falling to 7.8 percent. Whether this number is cooked or not, what the Democrats aren’t discussing is a labor participation rate lower than any time in more than 30 years; people are simply giving up looking and a three tenths drop when there were insufficient jobs created to even keep pace with population growth proves this number can only be attributed to a shrinking workforce.
“What the unemployment figure fails to show is that millions of Americans have dropped out of the job market during the president’s term. If job participation were at the same level as it was in January 2009, the unemployment rate would be 10.7 percent, Mr. Gillespie said.
“The fact that you have a White House celebrating an unemployment rate of 7.8 percent with 23 million Americans out of work or unemployed or underemployed tells you a lot about the failure of this administration’s policies,” added Gillespie.
Next up is the Vice Presidential Debate between candidates Paul Ryan and Vice President Biden. It should be interesting to see how the unemployment numbers play out in this week’s debate.
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