{"id":11448,"date":"2012-10-16T18:20:10","date_gmt":"2012-10-16T22:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/henrypayne.com\/?p=11448"},"modified":"2012-10-23T18:21:36","modified_gmt":"2012-10-23T22:21:36","slug":"payne-its-the-economy-mr-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/2012\/10\/payne-its-the-economy-mr-president","title":{"rendered":"Payne: It’s the economy, Mr. President"},"content":{"rendered":"

When the first two questions of a town hall debate come from a young voter worried he won’t have a job when he graduates and a gentleman who worries why gas prices have more than doubled in four years, it’s going to be a tough night for the incumbent. And these were\u00a0New York<\/em>\u00a0voters.<\/p>\n

President Barack Obama was back to his old feisty self Tuesday night – but the dynamics of this race fundamentally changed waaaay back with the first debate. As valiantly as Obama fought to bring the debate back to his themes of class warfare and Romney’s wealth, the voters aren’t interested.\u00a0Those voters were the questioners in the Hofstra University town hall<\/a>\u00a0and none of them asked about Romney’s tax returns.<\/p>\n

They had one collective concern: It’s the economy, stupid.<\/p>\n

As long as the media controlled the airwaves, Obama’s themes dominated the discussion. Now that Romney had direct access to voters via TV debates, Obama’s envy issues seem small compared o the big themes of unemployment, economic growth, and energy prices that Romney is about.<\/p>\n

Just when you could hear the Democratic base cheering Obama’s haymakers, the Michigan native would stand up the incumbent with one his own.<\/p>\n

The toe-to-toe confrontation on drilling was great theater – and devastating to President Glib. “How much did you cut licenses and permits on federal land and federal waters?” demanded Romney, wheeling on a suddenly stammering Obama who looked stunned that someone would challenge his audacious fib that he is a champion of carbon fuels.<\/p>\n

“The proof of whether a strategy is working or not is what the price is that you’re paying at the pump,” Romney continued to push. “When the president took office, the price of gasoline here in Nassau County was about a buck eighty-six a gallon. Now it’s four bucks a gallon.”<\/p>\n

Ouch.<\/p>\n

Romney even sounded more empathetic as he talked of visiting coal miners under siege from Obama’s War on Coal. “I was just at a coal facility where some 1,200 people lost their jobs,” said Romney, airing the pain of Eastern Ohio and West Virginia that the MSM has been covering up. ” I don’t think anyone really believes that you’re a person who’s going to be pushing for oil and gas and coal.”<\/p>\n

Time and again, Romney met more Obama promises for the next four years by bringing the discussion back to the last four years.<\/p>\n

“I think you know better,” said Romney. ” I think you know that these last four years haven’t been so good as the president just described and that you don’t feel like you’re confident that the next four years are going to be much better either. He said that by now we’d have unemployment at 5.4 percent. He said that by now middle-income families would have a reduction in their health insurance premiums by $2,500 a year. It’s gone up by 2,500 (dollars) a year. There are. . . one out of six people in poverty. When he took office, 32 million people were on food stamps; today 47 million people are on food stamps. How about the growth of the economy? It’s growing more slowly this year than last year and more slowly last year than the year before.”<\/p>\n

After the debate, I was on a TV panel with two Democrats who wanted to talk about how stiff Romney looked. About how uncomfortable he looked. But what’s uncomfortable is the numbers Romney cited.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the first two questions of a town hall debate come from a young voter worried he won’t have a job when he graduates and a gentleman who worries why gas prices have more than doubled in four years, it’s going to be a tough night for the incumbent. And these were\u00a0New York\u00a0voters. President Barack […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,87],"tags":[1226,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11448"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11448"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11449,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11448\/revisions\/11449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}