Debate Night, Round 2

Debate season 2012 is still rolling on, and the deeper we get into the season, the less fun Republican candidates seem to be having.

In congressional debates in Illinois and Massachusetts this week, Democratic candidates Tammy Duckworth and Elizabeth Warren put their Republican opponents up against the ropes.

The Vice Presidential debate is also happening tonight, and frankly, we hope current Vice President Joe Biden cleans Rep. Paul Ryan's clueless clock - a result that would surprise few people on the left or the right.

Biden is well known to enjoy the back-and-forth of a good debate and, while he hasn't been involved in a formal debate since he handily bested Sarah Palin four years ago, there have been reports that Biden's debate prep has been going exceedingly well.

Contrast that with the pre-debate actions of the man conservatives like to think of as their intellectual policy wonk, Paul Ryan. Earlier this week, when a local Michigan television reporter attempted to get some simple details from Paul Ryan on his positions on guns and taxes, Ryan abruptly ended the interview, and attempted to damage the reporter's credibility.

Then yesterday, as Ryan arrived at a campaign photo-op in Florida, he chided reporters for giving him softball questions. The reporters then asked him a hard question - the difference between his position and Mitt Romney's on abortion. Ryan appeared struck dumb for a moment, then evaded the question, telling reporters they would find out his position later, in the debates.

That kind of evasion will likely be the basis for Ryan's approach on foreign policy, with which he has almost no experience. Biden, on the other hand, is a long-time, seasoned foreign policy advisor, including many years on the Foreign Relations Committee during his time in the Senate.

While both Biden and Ryan are Catholics, they appeal to two entirely different parts of the church. Biden, a devoted Catholic, sides with the old-school, social-justice wing of the church, while Ryan - also a serious Catholic - sides with the socially conservative, culture-warrior wing of the church. The divide between the two men with regard to social issues will almost certainly feature prominently in tonight's debate.

The two men will also likely tussle about the $716 billion removed from Medicare subsidies to private companies. Biden supports Obamacare, which puts that money back into the health care system. Ryan, on the other hand, doesn't seem to be able to explain exactly what he and Mr. Romney would do with that money.

The biggest battle will likely be fought over the Ryan Budget, the core of the Romney/Ryan fiscal plan. As advisors and policy wonks from all political backgrounds seem to agree, the "math" behind Ryan's budget, which he recently told Fox's Chris Wallace was too complicated to explain, simply doesn't add up.

We're fairly certain Vice President Biden will land more than one solid punch on Ryan on many of these issues. The hardest choice for Biden will likely be which one will be the knockout punch.

A Friendly Media Suggestion

While you may not have noticed it, most of the American political media on both the political left and the political right have had similar problems for most of a week. On the left, the handwringing has been about the polls and the first Presidential debate. On the right, the pearl-clutching has been about the very positive jobs numbers that came out last Friday.

We're hoping that after we dress down our colleagues today, they'll pull their heads out of their backsides, maybe even by this afternoon. Hopefully, our industry can then get back to the business of reporting real political news stories, on topics like mendacious politicians, movement on tax policies and the Federal budget, the upcoming Vice Presidential debate and more.

We realize part of the problem is one we touched on yesterday, the whorish corporate media culture in America. Talking about tax policies, budget priorities, and policy implementation is often not as sexy as political media wonks think it is. Ratings, clicks and readership levels all reflect the fact that plain facts and plain talk often don't interest as many people as souped-up stories about "the fiscal cliff" or "taxmageddon."

Still, we have our standards, and ethically, we can't just blow out substantive content for the cheap, sell-out, get-ratings-at-all-costs approach our colleagues in the pure entertainment field have. That method is one that far too many of the politicians we cover also use regularly.

For our friends in the left-leaning media, our commentary today is a message to you, much like the one Preisdent Obam got last week. It's time to put on your big-boy and big-girl pants, shut the hell up, and get back to work. While the polls are still all over the place, and our friends in the polling divisions are having their own issues, the facts are clear.

President Obama didn't have the kind of debate performance we expected or that he expected. No, he didn't lose. In an ethical society, you still can't lose a debate to someone that lied the way Mr. Romney did. But Obama also didn't win. More importantly, most in the left-leaning media got played by the hyper-rapid response by the GOP after the debate, just as multiple media watchers said we would.

As Kevin Drum noted again twice this week, part of the reason the left-leaning media can be "played" like that is the gap between the number of right-wing media hacks and their media outlets, and the number of media outlets on the left. Contrary to the cries of unfair criticism from those like Joan Walsh, it's clear that those who are trusted in the left-leaning media do have more power to affect outside events - like the post-debate spin - then their counterparts on the right.

We certainly aren't calling for more hacks on the left to match the number of ethically challenged media folks on the right. That said, there's a smaller pool on the left. When too many are encouraged to make a splash, it's not at all hard to start a tidal wave.

As for those we know in the right-leaning media, you also need to put on your collective big-kid pants and quit denying reality. No one 'cooked the books' on the September jobs numbers released last Friday. When the unemployment numbers made the President look bad, you were more than happy to believe the BLS. The jobs numbers were good in September not because someone cooked the books, but because the economy is, in fact, recovering. As some professional economists have been saying for some time now, the economic trend lines have predicted that the U.S. would finally recover from the Bush Recession at some point this year. That our current recovery is coming at a time that's incredibly inconvenient for your side politically shouldn't drive you to the insanity of denying reality.

Facts are stubborn things, as Ronald Reagan once said, and as Ezra Klein noted recently, the jobs report is about the economy, not the election.

It's time we all get back to work, people, on all sides of the media. Politicians are still selling themselves to the lowest common denominator, and voting day is less than four weeks away.

Swingin' A Dead Cat

If you like to do a bit of traveling, as our staff does, you tend to notice that most places around the world have their own quirky habits and sayings that make them unique. One of the more bizarre but catchy regional phrases we've picked up over the years is supposed to be used for those times when you're telling someone you feel like a certain object or experience seems to be everywhere you turn: That you "can't swing a dead cat without hitting (the subject in question)."

For example, "Mr. Romney delivered a foreign policy speech on Monday in which you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a lie."

As multiple journalists reported Monday, including our friend and colleague Rick Ungar, Mr. Romney's foreign policy speech on Monday was yet another vague stack of lies and reversals of his previous policy claims. It's true that some portions of Romney's speech tried to make his approach seem different than President Obama's; however, if you believed what Mitt was saying on Monday, you'd also have to believe that what he's said multiple times in the past about foreign policy was a lie.

For example, Mr. Romney insisted he'd increase the size of the U.S. Navy - except he has no idea of what kind of ships the Navy needs, or how he'd be able to pay for them. The best guess by expert military journalist Spencer Ackerman is that Romney's naval wish list would add $30-40 billion to a federal budget that Romney also promises to somehow cut.

That says nothing of Romney's trade claim that President Obama hasn't signed any trade agreements - well, other than the three President Obama signed last October with South Korea, Panama, and Columbia. Or Romney's claim to support a two-state solution between Palestinians and Israelis - a solution he derided in that infamous 47% video this summer, when he thought his words were being spoken in private.

As we said earlier, you couldn't swing a dead cat through Mitt Romney's foreign policy speech without hitting a lie.

There was one other topic you also couldn't swing the cat around without hitting on Monday - self-proclaimed polling experts determining that the race is now over for President Obama.

It's a day like Monday when we loathe the corporate media culture that's turned many of the folks we once trusted into self-aggrandizing ratings whores. Many of those who cherry picked the polls on Monday, are the same hacks who helped enable the jobs report conspiracy theory last Friday. Frankly, some in the mainstream media seem willing to set themselves on fire if it would get them the attention and ratings they crave. Cherry-picking poll results to get a rise out of the audience is child's play, compared to wearing fire or swinging a dead cat.

Here's the truth: Single polls do not matter, except the one on election day. Accurate polling looks at trends, as we've told you many times over the years. It's one of the reasons we put such faith in Nate Silver and his team at FiveThirtyEight.com. They get the final numbers right because they get the aggregated polling trends correct, over time.

So what was Nate's take on Monday's polls? Other than the Pew poll - which may indeed be an outlier - Nate pointedly noted Mr. Romney's polling on Monday was weak. In aggregate, Mitt would have made no real gains at all without that odd Pew poll. In fact, by Monday evening, tracking polls already showed a shift back towards Obama. Yet how many of those same ratings whores will be excitedly selling today's polling trend back towards Obama with the same vigor they tried to sell those horserace polls on Monday?

We bet by the end of today, you'll be able to swing around as many dead cats as you want, and not hit a single member of the mainstream media who apologizes for their poll hysteria yesterday.