How much of an effect are these ads going to have on the race?

People are going to watch the ads and then watch Obama on the debates and/or on the campaign trail and see two completely different "people". The right has spent a LOT of time and money over the past 4 years building up this (as Bill Maher called him) "Barack X" character (to the extent that Clint Eastwood decided to have a "conversation" with him at the RNC ) but most people when they see Obama speak on TV, the campaign trail, just don't buy into the right's characterization of Obama. They don't see "Barack X", they just see Barack Obama.

"When Romney gets Desperate"

I'd say that he's been pretty desperate from the get-go. The REAL question IMHO is what will happen when he gets REALLY desperate! He's been playing the "Cadillac Queen" angle for awhile and seems to be sticking with it fact-checkers be damned and now he's started a new Obama anti-God angle though I don't know how far that's going to take him. I think that they pushed the anti-God angle with the debate over the birth control coverage and Obama has remained relatively unscathed by that. The conventions were a disaster for Romney and a boon for Obama, so really now all they have to hold on to are the debates and a torrent of campaign ads to convince people that we should dump Obama for him. I don't want to prematurely call the election for Obama yet just because it hasn't happened yet and it will depend largely on turnout, I'm just not seeing how/where he significantly pulls ahead in the polling.

Because people don't have those sort of relationships with their politicians?

Sounds like effort to muddy the waters

make it look like "both parties (want to) do it!"


Coming to a Romney/Ryan ad, campaign speech, and/or conference call near you soon?

The national debt never makes it into any conversations I have with people

It's mostly about health care, college costs, personal income, etc. The debt and deficit are problems that will need to be addressed at some point but there are lots of ways- mostly ways that right-wingers don't want to even discuss-that we can fix the debt/deficit, as well as ensure long-term solvency for Medicare and Social Security that don't involve the middle-class being even more burdened and/or having to completely shred every social program out there.

People doing so are nuts IMHO

Electing President Obama to a second term but then voting him a nice set of handcuffs in the form of a Republican Congress (when the last two years have been so horribly unproductive with just a Republican-controlled House and filibustered Senate) to go along with it isn't going to help things much.

Politifact sure puts out some "head scratchers"! I've called them on things several times

their Ryan Budget (as it relates to Medicare) "analysis" was their worst release to date IMHO. They are MAD LITERAL about everything, particularly so when it comes to claims made by Democrats.

+1

It's especially weird hearing Republicans jump all over President Obama over the job numbers when they don't believe that there is anything (other than cutting spending, giving tax cuts to "job creators", and eliminating regulations) that government can do to help generate jobs in the overall economy. They also never want to bring up the fact that Republican governors all over the country have been cutting public JOBS for the past 2 years, which has contributed to the high unemployment rate. I want to know where the accountability is for the "job creators" and why they're not actually creating very many jobs?!

Well, damn

might as well skip the election and call it for Romney/Ryan already. Geesh

I don't think that people understand this point as well as they should

Most of them think that a.)The Democrats controlled WH and Congress for 2 whole years! Why the hell didn't they get more done? and b.)The Democrats could never get a majority of votes to get a bunch of good stuff passed in the Senate. "How incompetent could one Congress be?" and c.)The Democrats rammed though a whole bunch of massive government spending and takeover of healthcare with their bare hands, so why couldn't they have done more on other things? "They just care about spending taxpayer dollars and taking away our freedoms!" Unfortunately for us (and the country), enough people either didn't get out to vote in 2010 or, worse, decided that putting the Republicans in charge of the House and electing a few more Republicans to the Senate was the "solution" to all of the above "problems"!



Republicans are curiously absent from any discussion of why things went down the way the did between 2009-2011. In fact, I'm not sure if most people understood how close we came to even more massive economic destruction last summer with the debt ceiling debacle.