My initial thoughts.Ultimately what's going to hurt Romney the most is that the person boxing him into corners was the moderator.
You don't think that will just result in cries of "Liberal bias!"?
"Liberal bias!" with a side of "CROWLEY LIED! Obama never said 'Terrorist attack!'
*
* He said 'acts of terror'!"But I do love the mod asking Romney a follow-up immediately afterward and he actually says "No. Let me go back." Fucking seriously. Then he just goes on to split hairs over which shitty parts of Arizona's shitty border law he thinks aren't shitty.
After the "Can you differentiate yourself from Bush?" question. Which is, like, the worst possible place of all the terrible places he could have snubbed an undecided voter who just asked him a question to his face.
Any other outlet mention live how the Green Party candidates were arrested just outside the premises? (They might have, I'm just curious.)
Jesus Christ, AGAIN? They already had to settle a lawsuit with Nader over the same shit.
A correction, though:
The Commission on Presidential Debates, founded by the Democratic and Republican parties, mandates that a candidate must have at least 15 percent support in national polls to be included. Since the CPD’s inception in the 1988 campaign, that has only happened once — when Ross Perot went onstage with President George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton in 1992.
This is not true. The CPD's 15% requirement was added in 2000. Per
the NYT, Perot was polling just under 15% in September of '92. (Incidentally, the poll also has him taking more votes from Clinton than from Bush.) Per
Wikipedia, Perot polled as high as 39% in June, but, after he quit and then unquit, he lost most of his supporters and was polling in the single digits by the time the debate rolled around.
I can't find the 1992 requirements offhand but I'm confident that the 15% was added in 2000 explicitly to keep guys like Perot (and Nader, and Buchanan) out.
EDIT: Oh, I almost forgot my favorite part: that woman's face when Romney responded to her question about restricting AK-47's by saying we need to teach kids not to have premarital sex. Can anybody get a cap of that?