Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Morning after debate....

4) Seeing Obama this time around makes it even more striking how off he was last time around.

5) In addition to wishing Obama had pounced on Romney for having no answer on pay discrimination aside from the free hand of the market, a quick reference to the difference between actually knowing and having a lifelong history of working with women vs. needing people to put together a binder of them for you would have been pretty awesome. Nobody found Hillary Clinton in a binder, but that actually might explain a lot about Sarah Palin.

6) There's probably no way to cram this into the pacing of the debate...but we could talk about the fact that Mitt Romney did not actually create Massachusetts from scratch? I find it pretty grating to watch him brag about successes that are the result of several hundred years of a political culture that values publicly funded education & equal opportunity. I'm guessing it's a lot harder to to get the best gender balance in high level state positions in the country if you start out in a state that isn't already the home of a lot of really successful women.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Debate!

Some random, rapid fire thoughts about the debate:

1) I wish Obama would have pointed out that Romney's answer to what he would do about pay discrimination for women was "nothing - the magical hand of the free market will fix it."

2) Mitt Romney really seems to have a strange but genuine hatred of single mothers. And China.

3) The amount of adrenaline on display in both the candidates is pretty spectacular. I feel like making coherent points in that kind of setting is probably one of those much harder than it looks kind of things.

Saturday, October 13, 2012

Undecided

James Fallows is doing a series on undecided voters, under the general theme of "who the hell are these people?" which gives me a great opportunity to revisit my growing animosity towards people who call themselves fiscally conservative and socially liberal. So I'm brainstorming new, more accurate ways that this could be phrased:

"I don't like paying taxes, but I do like strippers and porn."

or

"I don't believe in funding the federal government, and the fact that this makes bigots and fundamentalists my most natural political allies has not yet led me to reexamine my views"