Stephanopoulos has history of calling presidential debates for Democrats

Ideally, journalists who cover presidential debates should be fair, objective truth-seekers, but tonight’s showdown between President Obama and GOP challenger Mitt Romney may have the deck stacked in favor of the sitting president -- at least when it comes to ABC News’ coverage.

ABC News anchor and chief political correspondent George Stephanopoulos will be one of the journalists analyzing Wednesday’s debate for his network, and the former communications director for Bill Clinton has never been shy about his leftist leanings.

According to analysis from the Media Research Center's Newsbusters blog, Stephanopoulos declared victory for the Democratic candidate in eight out of the past nine general election presidential debates -- including Al Gore’s infamous eye-rolling-and-deep-sighing performance in his 2000 debate with George Bush, disagreeing with the majority of pundits who ceded victory to the soon-to-be president.

“Gore dominated,” Stephanopoulos declared after the debate. “It was even the way that he would interrupt Jim Lehrer and say, 'Listen, I want one more word.' He looked like he was dominating, and then again, the issues that the time was spent on, prescription drugs, education, Social Security, even the RU-486 and abortion issue, all of those favor Gore.”

Just last Sunday, during an appearance on "Good Morning America," Stephanopoulos argued that Romney is under “huge, huge” pressure. "He is behind right now. He is behind nationally, he’s behind in all of the battleground states. This is the last big audience that Mitt Romney is going to have with about four and a half weeks left to go.”

Should a journalist who is covering the presidential debates -- one who is ostensibly supposed to be neutral -- be offering such a negative opinion of one of the candidate’s chances in what could be a game-changing night?

Former New York Times executive editor Max Frankel criticized Stephanopoulos’ ascension from politics to punditry.

“The overnight transformation of George Stephanopoulos from partisan pitchman to television journalist highlights a disturbing phenomenon: the progressive collapse of the walls that traditionally separated news from propaganda,” warned Frankel way back in 1997. “Self-respecting news organizations used to pride themselves on the sturdy barriers they maintained to guard against all kinds of partisan contamination.”

For the past 15 years, there are numerous examples of Stephanopoulos championing Democrats with his purportedly “objective” analysis.

“(Obama) comes in at a significant disadvantage on commander in chief,” Stephanopoulos said after the 2008 debates between Obama and John McCain, a former prisoner of war. “People wonder whether he has this experience to be president, to handle national security, and I think on answer after answer after answer, he showed confidence, he showed toughness and he showed he belonged on that stage. ... Bottom line, the winner is Barack Obama.”

Stephanopoulos even gave the edge in 2004 to John Kerry, who went on to lose the election to George Bush. “I think the most important thing that Senator Kerry did stylistically last night is he showed strength in his demeanor,” Stephanopoulos opined post-debate. “I guarantee you that if you didn’t speak English, you walked in and watched the debate last night without the sound on, you would believe that John Kerry was the incumbent, was the president.”

Just last week, Stephanopoulos posted a video on his blog in response to one of his Twitter followers who asked if the momentum of the presidential race could change with the debates.

“(Here’s) the predicament that Mitt Romney faces right now,” explained Stephanopoulos. “You go back to the last 19 elections, in 18 of them the person who was ahead at this point, late September, 40 days out, has won the race,” adding that the former Massachusetts governor's “back is certainly up against the wall right now.”

So, who will win the debate tonight? If you ask Stephanopoulos, history says the odds are 88 percent that he’ll say Obama.

Source : foxnews[dot]com Read More

Ryan, confident about victory, says debates will offer voters 'very clear choice'

Republican vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan acknowledged Sunday the campaign has made some missteps, but expressed confidence about victory -- saying the presidential debates will offer voters a “very clear choice” in the final weeks of the race between failed policies and a stagnant economy or a “brighter future.”

Ryan said on “Fox News Sunday” that Romney will have the chance during the first debate Wednesday to “give the American people the choice we are offering.”

“We owe the country a very clear choice of a different future,” said Ryan, R-Wis. “We can either have a dynamic, growing economy that produces opportunity, or we can have a stagnant economy that fosters dependency. We can stick with the failed policies of the four last years … or we can get a brighter future.”

Ryan brushed aside recent polls showing President Obama leading Romney, and suggested that the so-called “mainstream media” has helped the president’s re-election effort.

 “We’re going to win this race,” Ryan said.

The roughly 20-minute interview covered a wide range of topics, including both candidates' economic policies.

Ryan said he and Romney want a 20 percent cut in all income tax rates, which would be paid by closing loopholes and deductions.

Ryan said Romney has been specific, but declined to say which loopholes, saying, "it would take me too long to go through all of the math."

The Obama campaign responded by saying: "Romney has promised $5 trillion in tax cuts skewed toward millionaires and billionaires, but refused to say how he'd pay for them without raising taxes on the middle class or exploding the deficit. He’s promised to repeal ObamaCare, but refused to say what he’d replace it with to protect the 129 million Americans with pre-existing conditions. He’s promised to repeal Wall Street reform, but refused to say what he’d replace it with so that big banks aren’t writing their own rules again."

Ryan acknowledged that Romney’s remark about 47 percent of Americans not paying taxes and being dependent on the federal government was a misstep.

“Mitt acknowledges himself that was an inarticulate way of describing how we're worried that in a stagnant Obama economy more people have become dependent on government because they have no economic opportunity,” said Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee. “It was an inarticulate way to describe what we're trying to do to create prosperity and upward mobility, and reduce dependency by getting people off welfare back to work.”

With five weeks before Election Day, Romney and Ryan are facing sharp criticism about why they are not leading in polls amid high unemployment and sluggish Gross Domestic Product, numbers that have historically sunk presidents seeking re-election.

Ryan argued that the Obama campaign has done “a very good job of distracting people.”

He also confirmed that Romney is set this week to deliver a major foreign speech, following the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, and the administration’s response.

“Their response was slow. It was confused, it was inconsistent,” Ryan said. “It’s part of a bigger picture of the fact that the Obama foreign policy is unraveling literally before our eyes on our TV screens.”

Ryan also disagreed with the assertion that the debate message of a “clear choice” is a departure from the earlier campaign message that the race is a referendum on Obama’s past four years.

"It's not a change in strategy,” he said. "It's a phase of the campaign we've now entered into. Because I think it's important. The president is trying to paper over his problems. The president has been trying to mislead and distort a record. It's a failed record. We think it was very important to point that out.”

Source : foxnews[dot]com Read More

Obama, Romney meet face to face amid pre-debate hype fitting of heavyweight match

The upcoming presidential debates are a final milestone in the 2012 presidential race between Mitt Romney and President Obama, who after months of challenging each other from afar meet in the kind of face-to-face conversation that can swing an election.

As proof of the debates’ importance, both campaigns have worked furiously over the past several days to create the perfect framework for the first debate Wednesday. Each has billing their candidate as the underdog, should he under perform, and the other as the more-skilled debater, the perfect setup to pounce on a poor showing.

 “I don’t know how to raise or lower expectations,” Romney told Fox News this week. “The president is a very eloquent, gifted speaker. He’ll do just fine. I’ve never been in a presidential debate like this and it will be a new experience.”

Watch Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan on “Fox News Sunday” on Sept. 30.   

Juleanna Glover, a founding partner of the Ashcroft Group and former Dick Cheney spokeswoman, said managing expectations for such a debate and “heralding the opponent” are really matters of common sense but failing to do so would be political “malpractice” on the part of either camp.

This will be Romney’s first presidential debate, after failing in 2008 to win the Republican nomination. But he arrives after having just debated nearly 50 hours over the course of 20 primary debates.

He also arrives at the first debate, in Denver, on the topic of domestic policy, neck-and-neck with Obama in most nationwide polls, but trailing by double-digits in recent polls for battleground states -- crucial in both candidates' quest for the White House.

Unlike the primary debates in which Romney entered as the frontrunner and relied on a strategy of steady performances as the deep field of challenges surged, then either fizzled or imploded, he will likely have to outperform the president to close the gaps – including as much as 10 points in Ohio, according to a Quinnipiac University/CBS News/New York Times poll released Wednesday.

“I think he’d going to have to perform solidly,” Glover said. “He’s going to have to provide some humor – as well as the knockout punch."

Still, Glover argues that no matter how many well rehearsed lines Romney might have that could add to the “lexicon of American politics” and the perfect setup lines to precede them, some perfect opportunity might just come down to serendipity.

“Whether such opportunities present themselves is a different story,” she said.

Both campaigns set out memorandums Friday touting the challenger.

And he Obama campaign, in an attempt to minimize expectations, has said the president is an exceptional yet long-winded orator.   

"Gov. Romney is a very skilled debater," Obama campaign manager Jim Messina told The Wall Street Journal. “So clearly the governor has the advantage."

Another Obama campaign strategy has been to point out that the president, with all of his official duties, has had less time to practice than Romney, who with Ohio Sen. Rob Portman playing the president has had several mock debates and his expected to spend much of the weekend in final preparation.

Meanwhile, Obama has reportedly met just a few times in Washington with Romney stand-in Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry.

Source : foxnews[dot]com Read More

Debates: Obama camp downplays expectations, Romney looks for game changer

It isn't often that top officials in President Obama's campaign praise rival Mitt Romney. But when it comes to the presidential debates, there is no stopping the plaudits.

"Gov. Romney is a very skilled debater," said Obama campaign manager Jim Messina. His boss, by contrast, is long and windy, "so clearly the governor has the advantage."

The presidential debates begin in less than two weeks, an important moment in any campaign. The Romney camp has for months argued this is the moment for their candidate to shine. With Mr. Romney lagging behind in national and most state polls, he more than ever needs to make a mark.

As a result both campaigns are working hard to shape expectations.

The Obama campaign wants to set a low bar for the president’s performance, reflecting in part the reality that Obama’s debating skills are weaker than his other political assets. More importantly, the campaign is looking to the three presidential debates, the first of which will be in Denver on Oct. 3, not for a breakthrough, but as a fresh chance to deliver the president’s core message.

Romney and his advisers, by contrast, are talking up the opportunity for the debate to shake up the race. His top advisers have made clear he is spending a lot of time preparing.  Romney began in the middle of the summer and spend almost all of the Democratic National Convention at the secluded Vermont estate of Kerry Healey, his former lieutenant governor in Massachusetts, where he ran practice sessions. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, played Obama in the simulations.

This summer, Romney advisers anticipated three key moments in the race. The first two – choosing a running mate and the national convention – have come and gone with Romney taking the lead. They are now pointing to the debates.

The extensive early preparation is unusual for a presidential candidate, as is the fact that his advisers publicized his preparations so widely.

The Romney campaign is battling history as well as Obama. Polling organization Gallup reviewed a half-century of data from before and after televised debates and found “few” instances in which the debates may have had a substantial impact on the election outcomes.

Click for more from The Wall Street Journal.

Source : foxnews[dot]com Read More