You mean the House, I believe. The Congress is split.



1948 Truman was down by 5-6 points and won by 4 with two challengers from his own party on his left (Wallace) and right (Thurmond).

1980 Carter was up by 8 before the debates and lost by almost 10 pts.

http://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index. ... c=115543.0

Not sure how Obama can lose Florida (at the moment) due to Seniors, and I think he can pull out NC as well, as their numbers have surged in that state the past four years.

I think its harder to judge 1948 because there were less polls and probably were less reliable. It was a comeback because of the split votes though. I am shocked Carter was up that much considering how bad the economy and gas situation was in 1980. There was the Iran thing which really sunk Carter even worse.

Obama won the debate on substance and facts. He lost it in the minds of the media and the general public, because superficially we react to visual cues that have no bearing on what the person is stating. Romney made arguements or statements that would get you laughed out of a bar arguement, but people perceived him as being able to provide authoritative leadership even though his answers were filled with nonsense and contradictions.

It is amazing how the media can give the public the illusion of vetting candidates like Romney and Bush, when they really never do anthing close to scrutinizing their records. People had no idea what a failure Bush was as an oilman and baseball executive, and they have no idea how Romney ran Bain. Romney "business" experience at Bain Capital gives him no guidance in fixing the economic problems of this country unless he is going to sell it off to China. His expertise is in gutting companies not in fixing them.

President Obama was no more qualified to be President then Romney to be honest...

Obama was fit to led the country as he was a community worker...

This argument just leads nowhere....

No point making it...

Also its Obama's fault for not making Romney own up to his ideas... If he thought people would not listen to Romney's crazy ideas... well The Presidents the biggest fool then...


I agree on debates being all about style....


Look at "There you Go Again" by Reagan...
That moment, he won the debate and it was by simply brushing off Carter with a folksy answer.

Well here is how I looked at a debate as an undecided voter...

Here in Canada in the last election, I was thinking of always voting liberal as always.. Then I noticed when the Conservative PM talked about the economy he spoke with confidence and stared into the Camera during the debate.
From that debate I do not much remember the policy points but to me, the most important issue to me was the economy... I asked my self who has the most competent on the economy...
"I was like well the PM has done a decent job so far and he seems confident on that issue and looks like he really cares"

So from the Debate I thought he won and then I looked up his policies and saw that he was an Economist, so I was like for sure he gets my vote...

Wasn't Romney also the governor of Massachusetts? What was President Obama prior to his election? Basically a Senator for two years plus two years of campaigning (yes, I know he was elected in 2004).

Maybe it is time we get rid of the idea that a President can "fix" an economy, liberal or conservative.

It's not about fixing anything, though. It's about putting the economy on a path to fix itself.

Nothing Romney plans on doing will help the economy.

Stimulus Spending will lead to short term economic growth but to long term Financial Problems...


Also Green Jobs is the biggest scam I have heard.
It creates job but will not create anywhere the number of jobs required.



Frankly to drive the economy, there has to be stability....
Stability over the fiscal health of a country, stability about rules and regulations, stability over tax policy...

In the US all these things are all up in the air, so there is no stability...


Frankly over 4 years a President says, this will be how taxes, rules/regulations and the budget will be like... I think that would really help the situation.

That's unrealistic.

What Obama did in the first debate was like going into the 4th quarter with a two touchdown lead and playing conservative D and not challenging anything. He had the advantage. I understand not wanting to give Romney fuel by attacking him too hard. But you still have to attack, not sit there and take all the lies laying down. It's going to be tough for Obama to come back from this because there isn't much time left and the masses have swung toward Romney. That debate performance pisses me off.

I believe Obama is the better choice for the long term future, Romney will make lives easier in the short term, with more problems likely down the road. The same thing could have been said of Gore and Bush in 2000.

Agreed.

However, Green Jobs is as much a scam as Global Warming is. The facts are there, and the glaciers aren't. You're right though, Green Jobs does not create the amount of jobs needed. But it is a growing market, and will be for a long time. So I think putting money into Green is worth while.

I agree putting money into Green Jobs and to develop the technology so it can be effective in providing energy...


However its Wrong for Obama to outright lie to people and say it will fix the economy.




hmm

true..

I sometimes forget that the American system that the President has far less control over the Legislative branch then a Prime Minister does.

Here in Canada, a PM elected with a majority govt is effectively a dictator for 4-5 years...

Isn't your statement about Obama being a long term solution at odds with your statements here?

I guess when I see the term stimulus spending, I think of the checks everyone got during the recession to try and boost the economy. I guess the term can also be applied to government spending to try to create jobs. Those two things are very different though. Giving people extra money with those checks was not trying to solve the problem, but patch it. Putting money into trying to create jobs is looking forward and trying to solve the problem.

However if you spend 100's of billion of stimulus spending, but do little to create stability in the overall country...

Keynesian economic theory really was not applied properly... Keynes assumed govts would have big surpluses due to good economic times but frankly due to the actions of Bush the US was in terrible financial shape before the recession.
So what should happen is, due to the surpluses govt can easily spend vast sums of money to boost the economy... Keynes realized that if govts instead borrowed massively to due this, it would just lead to long term financial pain and we have seen the results of that in Europe.

So imo Stimulus I think simply just leads to short term economic growth.

Until there is stability...
Meaning that people know what tax policy is for the new few years, how regulations will be for the next for years... How many times do we hear business leaders say its too volatile..
Even the top management at the bank I work at go on about we are staying conservative due to the volatility.

I am not against stimulus, but the most important thing govt can do is create a favourable economic climate and that is done by ... you guessed it... creating stability.

Doing a stimulus is short term, obviously, but it helps to create stability by giving the economy more time to recover.

People seem to forget that the first stimulus was done by Bush (with Democratic support). To blame the idea of stimulus on Democrats is just to ignore the facts.

The second one was done by Obama (with Republican support). The main difference was that the Obama stimulus was for building things, and all the money that went to businesses (such as GM) had to be paid back to the government (and subsequently was).

I was completely against the first stimulus because it was just a giveaway to banks that used it to give their CEOs million dollar bonuses. The second one was reasonable, and it seems to have worked ... Maybe not as well as we would have liked, but the only economists who will tell you it wasn't good are ones that are paid by Republicans to say that.

I agree that when a economy enters a recession, stimulus is needed to stop the economic downturn from getting worse.

That is what the stimulus programs did and nothing more...

The new deal did the same thing during the 30's...

It was the buildup to WWII that really boosted the American economy...

Lets hope it does not come to that...


I just think stimulus at this current point would be a total waste...We would get a few months of decent economic growth but end up with an unsustainable financial future. Well it already is unsustainable... Just wait for the medicare and social security expenses start rising dramatically in the next decade...

Here in Canada, we are going to have a 21 billion dollar Federal deficit in 2012 and people are saying the govt is being careless with money...
Lol countries would love to have a 21 billion dollar monthly deficit these days

The stimulus worked. I saw a Crossroads GPS commercial that excoriated Obama's stimulus as a failure, because it presented Obama as promising the unemployment rate dropping to 5.6% from the estimated 7.5% by showing a graph. Then it showed what actually occurred, the unemployment rate was 10.5% when it was enacted, and it dropped to 8.1% at the time the commercial was filmed.

The problem was it was too small for a recession that was bigger and longer lasting than estimated or projected by Romer, Rubin, Sumners, and Tyson. Krugman and others argued for a $2 trillion package at the time, and the one that was passed was larded with too many tax cuts (30-40%) for those (companies and 1%) that would not generate much economic activity.

Bush and Republican economic policy of the last three decades has been promoting and practicing quackery and should be sued for malpractice and lose their license. Instead, we are at the precipice of returning these voodoo charlatans to the White House.

Biden will beat Ryan solidly, and I think public opinion polls after the debate will show at least a 60-40 split in favor of Biden winning the debate.

Ezra Klein is in the tank for the Ryan as a serious man of Washington meme which is ludicrous.

??? Which unemployment stats are you using? The unemployment rate never went over 10%

The Stimulus did not massively reduce unemployment, it simply stooped things from getting much worse... Unemployment continued to increase through 2009 and increased through 2010.


The Unemployment rate shot up to just under 10% around the end of 2010 and is now down to around 8%.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united- ... yment-rate

The stimulus pretty much ensured the rate did not rise much over 10% and slow and steady economic growth brought the rate down bit by bit over the past few years...


To suggest the stimulus brought unemployment down to 8% on its own is well


The stimulus just made sure that when America was on its knees that it not fall over on its back...



True these policies started with Reagan but many democrats like Bill Clinton accepted and continued such policies and the President has not been able to do anything substantial in changing them.

I would say the debate is like this...

Ryan lacks experience and is a big bull shitter and Biden is a crazy old man who likes to ramble and smile...


WHAT A DEBATE!!

I think Biden is owning. go Joe

lol I wish Biden had possessed Obama during the first debate

Biden is really killing him. This is classic taking him to school.

The video is actually American Crossroads which is a subsidary of Crossroads GPS. Here is the video, they cropped the unemployment rate for the video, but on T.V. it spikes to 10.5%. They edited out that segment or cropped it to not display the 10.5%. The edited section is around the 9 sec. mark.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRBSDg4d4U4

I was going by the graph in the commercial I saw on TV, and it looked to be 10.5, but maybe I misread it and it was 9.5.

The merits of your contention are invalid. You negate your own opinion in your acknowledgement that it held umemployment from going above 10%. If unemployment had gone up to 12-15% the economic loss of wealth and the extension of the recession or a double dip would have created an unemployment rate around the 10% range at the moment, best case scenerio. So, no it is not ridiculous to state it lowered the unemployment rate by 2% or better.

Democrats are only providing half of the solutions to our nation's economic problems, but according to Republicans every economic difficulty in this country can be solved by cutting taxes which always raises revenue, even though they rarely do. The way to get ourselves out of debt is to follow the austerity B.S. that is killing the U.K. at the moment. Democrats pay down the deficit when the economy is going well like in the later years of the Clinton administration. Republicans never pay down the deficit not matter how the economy is doing. Clinton at least created new jobs (23 million), Bush created one million jobs in two terms or 8 years.



http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/ ... ?mobile=nc

lol @ everything

I can't decide if Paul Ryan looks more like a chiseled frog or Matthew Morrison from Glee.