Thus the essence of this
supposed rope-a-dope strategy has Obama allowing Romney -- to "self-construct" in Debate One; for Mitt to set
himself up as Obama's straw man in the Debate Two. And that debate's town hall format would
presumably be more favorable to the President than to the stiffly awkward
Romney.
Right now it remains to be seen
whether any progress Romney made in a week of building on his Debate One
narrative will turn out to have been lost in just over two-hours last Tuesday
night. But what is now clear is that the
Town Hall format provided an abundance of opportunities for Obama to expose that
narrative time and time again.
For example, Romney's " five point economic plan " that he
claimed will create "12 million jobs" and which produced no real response from
Obama during the first debate was on Tuesday gruesomely dissected as absent of
the intellectual property necessary to collateralize an economic
turnaround. After derisively labeling it
a "one-point plan," the President meticulously stacked up the trillions upon
trillions in costs specified in Mitt's proposal; weighing them against the
across-the-board 20 percent tax cut proposed by Romney:
"Look, the cost of lowering rates
for everybody across the board 20 percent along with what he also wants to do
in terms of eliminating the estate tax, along what he wants to do in terms of
corporate changes in the tax code -- it costs about $5 trillion.
Governor Romney then also wants
to spend $2 trillion on additional military programs, even though the
military's not asking for them. That's $7 trillion.
He also wants to continue the
Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. That's another trillion dollars.
That's $8 trillion.
Now, what he says is he's going
to make sure that this doesn't add to the deficit, and he's going to cut
middle-class taxes. But when he's asked, how are you going to do it, which
deductions, which loopholes are you going to close, he can't tell you.
We haven't heard from the
governor any specifics, beyond Big Bird and eliminating funding for Planned
Parenthood, in terms of how he pays for that ."
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