Romney wins presidential debate

[Jaguar]

I call derp. Women's votes are worth the same as men's votes.

[Uncle Sparky]

Exactly. I haven't seen any polls suggesting that Romney has a huge lead among men. So, did he cut into Obama's lead among women?

[Guynemer]

Supplying his original long form birth certificate. He's still not done so. Jon's linked to his COLB which is not the same thing..

You are just so goddamned adorable.

[rah]

Dumb as a rock is more like it.

[The Mad Monk]

New ads: Obama is sulky, Romney is a meanie.

[Asher]

Of course Asher will believe the self-anointed "Fact Checkers" who are squarely in the Obama media circlejerk who are probably going into overtime pretending that up is down.

I like how supposedly intelligent people can be so stupid when it comes to believing what they want to be true.

Facts are facts, and fact checkers who provide citations to back up their facts are not liars. You continue to wave your hand and pretend like they are because you don't want to understand the realities of the world and the politician you've tied your balls to.

[giblets]

I call derp. Women's votes are worth the same as men's votes.

Just as black votes count the same as white votes, votes from lower income people count the same as votes from higher income people, rural votes count the same as urban votes, and so on? Should we ignore all voting trends for particular demographics?

[Asher]

They had a supermajority in the Senate until Scott Brown was elected (1 year). A supermajority in the House until the midterms (2 years).

Again, you are the expert in this field (clearly)...

but...

Obama only had a supermajority in the senate from July 7, 2009 (Al Franken) til August 25, 2009 (Ted Kennedy croaking).


Also, from the interwebs:

By the time Al Franken was sworn in on July 7, 2009, Ted Kennedy had not cast a Senate vote for about four months because he was terminally ill with brain cancer. (He died on August 25, 2009.) Robert Byrd was also hospitalized from May 18 through June 30, 2009 and may not have been well enough to attend Congress and vote for some time afterward. Thus the Democrats did not really have the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster until Kirk took office. Byrd (who died in June 2010) was also periodically too ill to attend and vote during the September 2009-February 2010 period, though I have not been able to confirm this with a quick Google.

[Elok]

Dumb as a rock is more like it.

Can't you compromise and say he's "uhh...durr..able?"

No? Okay.

[Asher]

Also, if the Dems had a 257-178 lead in the house, that seems to also not qualify as a supermajority...

Also, is it true that the Republicans filibustered over 400 times? If so, the claim that Obama didn't get much done is pretty hilarious.

[regexcellent]

THe filibuster has become a stand-in for a straight-up vote. In all but name you need 60 votes to pass stuff in the Senate today. With any majority in the House (217+ votes) and 60 senators and the white house, you have complete control of the government. The dems had that.

What they also had was a complete unwillingness to work with the Republicans in any way.

[Ben Kenobi]

You are just so goddamned adorable.

Hey, my new place here just changed their policies so I had to submit all my documentation twice inside of a month. Just so I can have a parking space.

Seriously, **** Obama. More scrutiny to park than to become leader of the free world.

[giblets]

THe filibuster has become a stand-in for a straight-up vote. In all but name you need 60 votes to pass stuff in the Senate today. With any majority in the House (217+ votes) and 60 senators and the white house, you have complete control of the government. The dems had that.

What they also had was a complete unwillingness to work with the Republicans in any way.

That's why they adopted a Republican model for health care reform, right?

[Ben Kenobi]

What is special about the long form birth certificate?

I might ask the same thing. I just had to supply my original, (among other crap, that I have to have), just to park. Copies weren't good enough.

Why is that more evidence than the normal birth certificate? You realize that the birth certificates that most presidents that have published them have published were not 'original' in the way you want.

If they wouldn't accept it for the BS I have to do, then I don't see why the same scrutiny should be given to Obama. It's seriously about 40 bucks to get it. Why didn't Obama just pay 40 bucks, get the birth certificate and then the whole issue was over and done with?

[Dinner]

Nate Silver from 538 on yesterday's debate.

Polls Show a Strong Debate for Romney

By NATE SILVER

Instant-reaction polls conducted by CNN and CBS News suggest that Mitt Romney was the winner of the first presidential debate.
A CNN poll of debate-watchers found Mr. Romney very clearly ahead, with 67 percent of registered voters saying he won the debate, against just 25 percent for President Obama.
A CBS News poll of undecided voters who watched the debate found 46 percent siding with Mr. Romney, 22 percent for Mr. Obama and 32 percent saying it was a tie.
Google, which is experimenting with online surveys, found 38.9 percent of respondents saying they thought Mr. Obama performed better in a poll it conducted during the debate, against 35.5 percent for Mr. Romney and 25.6 percent who said it was a draw. But a second poll they conducted after the debate found 47.8 percent of respondents giving Mr. Romney the advantage, against 25.4 percent for Mr. Obama.
There is not a lot of empirical research on the relationship between instant reaction polls and their eventual effect on the head-to-head polls. However, these were strong numbers for Mr. Romney where comparisons to past post-debate polls are available. A similar CBS News poll conducted among undecided voters after the first debate in 2008, for example, found that 40 percent said that Mr. Obama won the debate, against 22 percent for John McCain. The head-to-head polls moved toward Mr. Obama by about three percentage points after that debate, although some of that may have been from the momentum that Mr. Obama had carrying into the evening.
The 67 percent of voters in the CNN poll who said that Mr. Romney won Wednesday night’s debate was higher than in any of the network’s surveys of the 2008 debates.
By comparison, 51 percent of debate-watchers in a CNN poll after the first presidential debate in 2008 said that Mr. Obama had the stronger performance. And 58 percent said so after the third and final presidential debate in 2008.
There may be some mitigating factors for Mr. Obama. First, although the conventional wisdom was that Mr. Obama had a lackluster performance throughout most of the debate — he certainly had an extremely cautious and defensive strategy — there were few obvious moments in which he said things that will make for compelling YouTube clips or cable news soundbites.
Second, head-to-head polls throughout the election cycle have been hard to influence for any reason. There are few undecided voters remaining — and undecided voters may be less likely than others to have actually watched the debates.
Still, it seems likely that Mr. Romney will make at least some gains in head-to-head polls after the debate, and entirely plausible that they will be toward the high end of the historical range, in which polls moved by about three percentage points toward the candidate who was thought to have the stronger debate.
The FiveThirtyEight “now-cast” — our estimate of what would happen in an election held immediately — had Mr. Romney trailing by a wider margin than three points in advance of the debate. (Instead, it put his deficit at about five points nationwide.) But our Nov. 6 forecast anticipated that the race would tighten some. It’s going to take a few days for any reaction to the debate to filter through the FiveThirtyEight model.
My own instant reaction is that Mr. Romney may have done the equivalent of kicking a field goal, perhaps not bringing the race to a draw, but setting himself up in such a way that his comeback chances have improved by a material amount. The news cycle will be busy between now and Nov. 6, with a jobs report coming out on Friday, a vice-presidential debate next week and then two more presidential debates on Oct. 16 and Oct. 22.
According to one prominent offshore gambling site, Pinnacle Sports, Mr. Obama’s odds of winning the election declined to about 73 percent after the debate from around 80 percent beforehand.

CNN and CBS polls show Romney got the better of it while Google's online polling shows Obama did. I still think it was a tie from my point of view though Romney certainly was more aggressive and butted in a lot while Lehrer was weak and let him constantly speak out of turn.