Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Focus Group Of Mostly Former Obama Voters Switch To Romney-Saw different debate than those polled by CNN


Luntz Focus Group Of Mostly Former Obama Voters Switch To Romney-Saw different debate than those polled by CNN. 
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12:10 PM - 17 Oct 12 · Details

A Frank Luntz focus group made up mostly of former Obama voters say they now support Mitt Romney.

"Forceful, compassionate, presidential," one participant said.
"Confident and realistic," said another.
"Presidential," another told Luntz.
"Enthusiastic," another reacted.
"Our next president," one man said.
"Dynamo, winner," said one more.

"He's lied about everything. He lied to get elected in 2008, that's why I voted for him. I bought his bull. And he's lied about everything, he hasn't come through on anything. And he's been bullsh**ting the public," one member of the focus group said.  See The Video

The Presidential race is boiling down to one dominant issue: which party's policies will do more to help the financially stressed American middle class. President Obama's campaign theme is that Mitt Romney and the Republicans cater to the rich, while Mr. Obama cares about struggling families.
He may care, but he sure hasn't done much for them. New income data from the Census Bureau, tabulated by former Census income specialists at the nonpartisan economic consulting firm Sentier Research, reveal that the three-and-a-half years of the Obama Presidency have done enormous harm to middle-class households.
In January 2009, the month President Obama entered the Oval Office and shortly before he signed his stimulus spending bill, median household income was $54,983. By June 2012, it had tumbled to $50,964, adjusted for inflation. (See the chart nearby.) That's $4,019 in lost real income, a little less than a month's income every year.
Unfair, you say, because Mr. Obama inherited a recession? Well, even if you start the analysis when the recession ended in June 2009, the numbers are dismal. Three years after the economy hit its trough, median household income is down $2,544, or nearly 5%.
Add the authors: "The overall decline since June 2009 was larger than the 2.6 percent decline that occurred" during the recession from December 2007 to June 2009. For household income, in other words, the Obama recovery has been worse than the Bush recession.  
Read More
HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. — In the post-debate spin room Tuesday night, Mitt Romney’s senior advisers and surrogates took aim at moderator Candy Crowley as they defended their candidate’s response to a question on the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in Libya.
“I thought it was terrible,” former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu said when asked by The Daily Caller what he thought of Crowley’s performance. “I think she had no business trying to be a fact-checker on the stage, because she was dead wrong.”
Crowley incurred the ire of Team Romney after she said that, contrary to the Republican nominee’s objections, President Barack Obama did in fact use the phrase “act of terror” when referring to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi during his Sept. 12 Rose Garden address. Romney had been trying to argue that the administration avoided admitting that terrorists were behind the attack for weeks after the event.
Romney’s handling of the Libya issue during the debate was widely disparaged by conservative commentators, including Charles Krauthammer, who argued that the Massachusetts Republican “missed an opportunity” at a point where he “really could have scored.”
But many of the Romney aides assembled in the spin room placed the blame for the exchange squarely on Crowley.
“She was wrong,” senior Romney aide Ed Gillespie told reporters. “The fact is, the president did not call the attack on our consulate in Benghazi a terrorist attack in the Rose Garden. … He said ‘acts of terror will not shake our faith,’ but he did not say that this was an act of terror.”  Read More
A senior U.S. defense official says an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency was among those killed in a suicide bombing at an Afghan intelligence office — the latest so-called "insider attack" in the war.
The attack Saturday in Kandahar province killed four Afghan intelligence officials and two U.S. intelligence officers. One of the Americans has been identified as a female solider — 24-year-old Brittany B. Gordon, assigned to a military intelligence company from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington.
The official said the other American was an operative working for the CIA. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information on the record.
NATO says the bomber was a member of Afghanistan's intelligence agency, but the Afghans deny that.
Voters in nine key states will get a mass dose of Mitt Romney on their television screens starting Wednesday as the Republican presidential candidate unleashes a $12 million, six-day advertising blitz.

The crucial battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Virginia will get the
lion’s share of the ads which will also run in Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Wisconsin, theNew York Times reports.

And the onslaught will only get more frantic, with a total of $83 million to be spent by the two campaigns and the various political action committees that support them.

The Times said political advertising is so heavy that all time-slots in Nevada have now been bought up on some programs.

Two of the top five “saturated TV markets” from election advertising are in Nevada, two in Ohio and one in Colorado, the Times reported. In order, they are Las Vegas, Cleveland, Denver, Reno, and Columbus.
Tonight’s debate between Governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama was in many ways deeply different from the first debate between both men. Both men came out more evenly matched, traded attacks more vigorously, and the high volume of the attacks.
And much of the reaction post-debate seems to have declared it a draw, with CBS’ instant poll giving President Obama a narrower victory than Vice President Joe Biden enjoyed in their instant poll last week (Romney scored a much more lopsided victory on questions related to the economy, dominating by 65-35). CNN flipped from the Vice Presidential debate, giving Obama a 7 point victory over Romney, with 46 percent saying Obama won and 39 percent saying Romney won.
At the same time, the CNN poll showed wide advantages for Romney on questions relating to the economy and health care, confirming the CBS poll’s numbers. Only Frank Luntz’s focus group on Fox – comprised mostly of former Obama voters – gave Romney a lopsided victory unequivocally.
Responses from pundits were also unpredictable. Charles Krauthammer gave the President the victory on points, as did Ramesh Ponnoru of National Review. Ari Fleischer declared the debate a draw, as did Ron Fournier of National Journal. MSNBC’s anchors unanimously declared Obama the winner, while Sean Hannity gave Mitt Romney a solid victory.
Yet one element was virtually uncontested by everyone – this was a debate where rudeness was the norm, rather than the exception. Moderator Candy Crowley herself openly said she didn’t understand the “We hate each other” vibe between the candidates. And to quote political scientist Scott Pelley, who was interviewed by CBS News following the debate:
“We have never seen anything like that in presidential history,” CBS News anchor Scott Pelley said following the debate. “They turned every question from the audience into an attack on the other.”
Pelley called it the “most rancorous presidential debate ever.”
Whether this rancorous attitude will do much to endear either candidate to swing voters remains to be seen. Certainly, it may serve to blunt the President’s likability numbers, and given the closeness of the victory, Obama may not make up as much ground against Romney as he might like.  Read More
Ed Note:  The problem for BO in all of this is that his only advantage is "likeability."  While he may have made his base happy, women and especially independent women won't like the sharp edged BO.  He may have barely won the night and lost the election.

President Barack Obama during Tuesday’s presidential debate claimed that his administration has taken an even-handed approach to both tradition fuel sources (i.e. coal and oil) and “green” energy.
While many Blaze readers are familiar with the president’s most recent, uh, “successes” in clean energy, how many know about his administration’s most recent drilling ban?
In case you missed it, the U.S. Department of the Interior in August made the decision to close off from drilling “nearly half of the 23.5 million acre National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska,” according to the Wall Street Journal, which would seem to fly in the face of the president’s oft-repeated claim that his administration is fostering some sort of oil boom.
“The area is called the National Petroleum Reserve because in 1976 Congress designated it as a strategic oil and natural gas stockpile to meet the ‘energy needs of the nation,’” the report adds.
“Alaska favors exploration in nearly the entire reserve. The feds had been reviewing four potential development plans, and the state of Alaska had strongly objected to the most restrictive of the four. Sure enough, that was the plan Interior chose,” the report adds.
According to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, the plan will:
… help the industry bring energy safely to market from this remote location, while also protecting wildlife and subsistence rights of Alaska Natives.” He added that the proposal will expand “safe and responsible oil and gas development, and builds on our efforts
However, despite Mr. Salazar’s most sincere assurances, very few in the energy industry (or Alaska for that matter) agree with him.
“In an August 22 letter to Mr. Salazar, the entire Alaska delegation in Congress — Senators Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski and Representative Don Young — call it ‘the largest wholesale land withdrawal and blocking of access to an energy resource by the federal government in decades,’” the Journal reports.
Yes, even Sen. Murkowski is against the drilling ban.
Interior’s decision, the letter adds, “will cause serious harm to the economy and energy security of the United States, as well as to the state of Alaska.”  Read More
President Obama edged Mitt Romney for a win in the second presidential debate Tuesday night, 37 percent of uncommitted voters said in a CBS News instant poll.
Ed Note:  WHY BO LOST THE DEBATE AND DOESN'T KNOW IT YET. 
The Real Numbers: they used a sampling that weighted democrats over republicans by 2%.  So the real number was probably more like 35% to 32% BO victory.  Well within the margin of error.  But here are the rest of the numbers they don't talk about.  Virtual tie when the Pres needed a knockout.  Second, and most important, the real numbers said that 33% of the people thought it was a tie.  That means that two thirda of the viewers thought it was either a tie or that Romney won.  BO failed to get the one sided victory he needed to match the previous Romney win. 72% thought Romney won the first debate. 
Moments following the debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., 37 percent of voters polled said the president won, 30 percent awarded the victory to Romney, and 33 percent called it a tie. After some particularly animated exchanges between the two candidates, 55 percent of voters said Mr. Obama gave direct answers, but 49 percent also said that about Romney.
As for who would do a better job of handling the economy, the president made some headway on closing that gap. Before the debate, 71 percent said they believed Romney would, while only 27 percent said they thought Obama would; after the debate, 34 percent said the president would better handle the economy, with 65 percent saying Romney would.
Obama would also be more likely to help the middle class, according to 56 percent of voters after the debate, compared with 43 percent who said that about Romney.
The survey polled 525 voters who are undecided or who may still change their minds. Most of these uncommitted voters are not affiliated with a political party: 56 percent describe themselves as politically independent, 21 percent identify as Republicans, and 23 percent are Democrats.  Read More
Posted by Robby Ball at 8:14 AM