Debates

Count syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan among the commentators that felt Mitt Romney won Monday's presidential debate in Boca Raton, Florida. Speaking on Fox News shortly after the event's conclusion, Buchanan said that by the end of the debate, "Romney was smiling, he was relaxed, he looked like a winner, and the president seemed, was making some petty attacks on him I thought, and seemed…

Talk about the law of unintended consequences . . . On today's Morning Joe, Willie Geist interviewed an audience member sporting a T-shirt reading "Mika Made Me Republican." The good-natured fellow explained that his daughter had made the T-shirt for him, that he was an independent who had voted for Perot, and that he watches Morning Joe daily because he likes to hear what the other side has…

Although much of Obama's media thought he won Monday's presidential debate in Boca Raton, Florida, Fox News's Chris Wallace saw it much differently. Speaking moments after the event's conclusion, Wallace said, "I felt in the middle of the debate that if I had been on a desert island for the last four years, and I had just been parachuted into this debate, I would have thought the guy that…

On PBS's Charlie Rose show on Monday, as the group discussed the night's presidential debate, New York magazine's John Heilemann described Mitt Romney's past statements on foreign policy as "relatively harsh and relatively bellicose," as he argued that Romney had faced political "dangers" in his foreign policy positions "because he's been surrounded by some number of neo-conservative foreign…

During his special post-debate Hardball,  Chris Matthews's panelists -- with the exception of Republican Michael Steele -- praised moderator Bob Schieffer’s ability to get Romney “to be quiet.”  Apparently it’s the job of the moderator to keep the Republican docile during debates in the minds of liberals.  Matthews also liked the format of Monday's debate because it denied Romney from being…

Martha Raddatz boosted President Obama on ABC after the final presidential debate on Monday evening, just as she did during the earlier vice presidential debate that she moderated. Raddatz asserted that Obama "humanized what he was talking about. He talked a lot about the troops; he talked about the survivors from 9/11; he talked about the people in Israel. So if, in fact, he was going towards…

In the post debate commentary of the third – and last – presidential debate on foreign policy, on Monday, Chris Matthews just could not help himself spewing another diatribe about the racial hatred that he insists is ingrained into the soul of America’s conservatives.  In fact, clucked Matthews, they’re so hateful of Obama that they want him out of the White House more than they want al-Qaeda…

Whatever his biases, and he has biases, Bob Schieffer didn't show them tonight. Unlike Candy Crowley and Martha Raddatz, Schieffer managed to moderate this debate without revealing his own positions. Well done.

On the October 20 broadcast of the Melissa Harris-Perry show, her ‘Dear, Mr. President’ segment touched upon an issue that is glorified amongst liberals: gun control.  In her segment, Harris-Perry is alluded to the question about assault weapons that was included in last week’s town hall style presidential debate.  Here, the Tulane professor insinuated that the mentally disabled are unjustly…

When asked by CNN what "one foreign policy question" he would ask the President, Dan Rather didn't mention Libya and instead asked a generic question about a threat to world peace. Is he a journalist or a Miss America contestant? CNN's Brooke Baldwin inquired of Rather on Monday, "what is the one foreign policy question that you are absolutely dying to ask of the President?" His answer: "…

Cher went on another anti-Mitt Romney Twitter rant Monday hours before the last presidential debate. She began, "Tonight is final debate & I’m praying Obama Kicks mittens ass 2 the curb!"

You don't know whether to laugh or cry upon reading the Sunday night shots campaign Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Politico took at Mitt Romney and his campaign. Maybe these guys really believe that the Romney campaign is the one which still desperately needs a "last chance to move the needle in any significant way in the swing states that will decide the election," and that "Obama is…

On Sunday's NBC Meet the Press, moderator David Gregory grilled Florida Senator Marco Rubio on Mitt Romney's "binders full of women" comment: "Can you understand why some women have that reaction, that he seems sort of out of touch with what modern women are going through?" Gregory also seized on Romney's support of flexible work schedules for women as more evidence of a supposed disconnect…

When CBS’s longtime Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer sits down in Boca Raton, Florida, tonight to moderate the final 2012 presidential debate, he’ll be following three journalists who became targets for criticism over how they handled their moderating duties. Upset liberals scorned PBS’s Jim Lehrer for taking a hands-off approach in the first debate on October 3, with MSNBC analyst Howard…