HENDERSON, Nev. - Nearing their first face-off, President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney are hunkering down for intense preparations ahead of Wednesday's presidential debate, where the GOP nominee hopes to change the trajectory of the White House race.

Obama was huddling Monday with top advisers at a desert resort in Nevada. Romney had practice planned in Massachusetts, where he also spent most of the weekend working with his debate team. The Republican challenger was then headed to Denver, the site of the first debate, later Monday for a rally and more preparation for the high-stakes event.

Five weeks from Election Day, polls show Romney trailing Obama in many of the nine states that will determine the outcome of the White House race. The three October debates give Romney one of his best opportunities to stem Obama's momentum and convince the public to back his vision for the nation's future.

"What I'm most concerned about is having a serious discussion about what we need to do to keep the country growing and restore security to hardworking Americans," Obama said during a rally in Las Vegas Sunday night. "That is what people are going to be listening for. That's the debate you deserve."

As the candidates prepped for a debate focused on domestic issues, Republicans were keeping up the pressure on Obama on international issues, namely his administration's handling of the attack on a U.S. consulate in Libya that led to the death of the American ambassador and three others.

Romney, in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, repeated his criticism of Obama for having called the attack and other unrest in the Middle East "bumps in the road."

"Our country seems to be at the mercy of events rather than shaping them," Romney wrote. "We're not moving them in a direction that protects our people or our allies."

Romney planned to deliver a major foreign policy speech in the coming weeks.

Both candidates were spending the days leading up to the debate in battleground states, with Romney in Colorado and Obama in Nevada. Each had just one official event planned during his stay, but they hoped their mere presence in the states would drive local media coverage.

Obama left the lakeside resort where he is prepping for the debate briefly Sunday evening for a rally at a Las Vegas high school. The 11,000-person event was focused in part on rallying Hispanics, a key source of support for the president in Nevada, and featured a performance by the popular Mexican rock band Mana.

Keeping with his campaign's efforts to lower expectations, Obama told the crowd that while he was "just OK" at debating, his opponent was "a good debater."

Romney's team has been playing the expectations game as well, though his allies were sometimes pushing the stakes in opposite directions.

GOP running mate Paul Ryan on Sunday shot down the notion that Romney needed to have a breakthrough performance Wednesday night, saying he didn't think one event would make or break the campaign.

But New Jersey's Republican Gov. Chris Christie, a Romney supporter, said that after the first debate: "This whole race is going to be turned upside down."

Romney's team has made no secret of the fact that the former Massachusetts governor has been practicing for the debates intensely for several weeks. Ohio's Republican Sen. Rob Portman, who is playing Obama in practice sessions, travels frequently with Romney and the two sometimes speak to the press together.

Obama aides, on the other hand, have kept quiet about how and when the president is practicing. Some top members of his debate team, including senior advisers David Axelrod and David Plouffe, traveled with Obama to Nevada on Air Force One.

But Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who is standing in for Romney, made his way to the resort in Henderson on his own.

http://newyork.newsd...-prep-1.4059601

நேற்றைய தோல்வியை மறந்து சில நிமிடங்கள் சந்தோசப்பட வேண்டுமாயின் இதோ சில ஆறுதல் வசனங்கள்:

Posted at 08:50 AM ET, 10/04/2012

Obama lost the first debate, but he will still win the election

By James Downie

In case you had not heard yet, President Obama had a poor first debate on Wednesday night. From the start, the president looked tired, unfocused and unprepared. His answers were rambling, his personal anecdotes were few, and his effective punches were even fewer. He never mentioned the “47 percent” video, Bain Capital or any number of other attacks that have hurt Republican nominee Mitt Romney both across the country and in swing states. Aside from two sequences — Obama getting Romney to concede that his Medicare plan is essentially a voucher and asking if Romney was “keeping all [his] plans secret because they’re too good”— the president was certainly outclassed.

And yet, the president’s supporters would be wrong to wring their hands. Fundamentally, Obama’s loss will not matter. At most, Wednesday night was a case of “too little, too late” for Romney. Yes, the polls will probably move a point or two in Romney’s direction after the first debate. But all the evidence suggests that for Romney, whether or not you believe he should be president, closing the gap and beating Obama is a bridge too far.

Consider the task facing Romney going into Wednesday’s debate: Nationally, RealClearPolitics’s poll average had him down three points; Nate Silver’s model had him down four. He had held a lead in a major poll exactly once since the end of August. The electoral college looked even worse for him: RealClear’s map gave Obama 269 electoral votes safe or leaning to Romney’s 181 (with 88 in toss-up states); HuffPost Pollster gave Obama a 290-191 lead; and Nate Silver’s model had Obama winning an average of 319 electoral votes to Romney’s 218, a comfortable margin. Even Karl Rove had 277 votes safe or leaning to Obama, with another 70 as toss-ups.

“Ah,” you say, “that may be true, but surely the gap is small enough to close? And wouldn’t the first debate be enough to bring this race back to a dead heat?” In a word, no.

Let’s start with the second question. Incumbent presidents almost always have a poor first debate: George W. Bush lost to John Kerry in 2004, for example, and Walter Mondale beat Ronald Reagan so badly in 1984 that there was a spate of articles asking if the incumbent was too old for the presidency. Yet never has a challenger’s strong first debate performance <a data-xslt="_http" href="http://fivethirtyeig...nger-in-polls/" target="_blank">closed as large a national polling gap as Romney faced going into last night’s debate. Furthermore, most post-debate polling bumps come from previously undecided voters, of which there is a historically small amount in this campaign, thus making it even less likely that Romney could exceed past norms. And Romney would need to outdo history by quite a distance — only Harry Truman has come back from a national deficit as large or larger than Romney’s at this point in the campaign.

If Romney would have to pull off a miracle to close the gap in national polling, he has no shot at matching the president in the electoral college. As mentioned above, forecasters commonly predict that Obama already has a big lead of safe and leaning states. If we assume Romney will improve in the polls, there would be around nine “swing states”: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin. There’s one problem here for Romney: He is trailing, and has been consistently trailing, in all but two — North Carolina, where he’s held a small lead, and Florida, this election’s closest thing to a 50-50 state. Romney doesn’t need to win two out of those nine; in almost every scenario, he will need six or seven out of those nine to win, including at least two or three states where he is behind by several points more than he is nationally.

All of which brings me to the final point: Given the state of the race before last night’s debate, even most Romney backers would agree that a Romney victory would require a flawless campaign the rest of the way from Romney and a blunder or two from Obama. After six years of both these men running for and/or being president of the United States, is there really anyone out there who thinks Mitt Romney can go a month without making a single mistake? Who thinks Barack Obama, who has been playing it safe for at least several months now, will suddenly make a reckless error, as opposed to a merely lackluster performance? (Or, if you’re Sean Hannity and co., do you believe the lamestream media will suddenly forget their liberal bias and stop protecting the president while assaulting Mitt Romney?)

Seriously, does anyone believe that?

The fact is that, come October, presidential elections cannot permanently change course over a few days or hours (unlike, say, media narratives). The majority of voters have already made their decision, and the debates won’t provide enough of a boost to alter the contest’s trajectory. Sadly for Romney, the path the race is stuck on ends with his defeat.

http://www.washingto...d57eb_blog.html

Edited October 4, 201213 yr by மல்லையூரான்