Transcripts For MSNBCW The Cycle 20121023 : vimarsana.com

0 do, which was establish that he had a presidential temperament and stature to be commander in chief, which the early reaction showed. fair-minded observers would say he hit that mark. he also wanted to take away the ability of the president in his closing arguments these next two weeks to cast romney as a warmonger, and i think he did that. i m told they wanted to not scare women and turn it to the economy whenever they could, and he did all that. so i m actually from obama s point of view very anxious a day after. it also suggests that kind of prevent/defend strategy shows how confident they were last night. matt, does romney seem competent as command ner chief when he continually is hugging the president s positions and saying i agree, i agree, i agree and i was no substantive critique of your foreign policy? i think the short answer yes, is that won t please many progressives who know he flip-flopped light. for those who started to tune in to the debates recently, and i think that has broad appeal. i think it does meeted hurdle, and the democrats won t cast him as having flip-flopped around on the issues. they have to make a much deeper critique of the house republican agenda that he be bringing with him into the white house if they re going to really close the deal in the next couple weeks. matt, this was the foreign policy-specific debate last night, and by my count it was 27 minutes before the candidates decided to talk about domestic policy instead. it seemed like a constant battle between the classification of the debate and basic gravity, which was trending towards a domestic debate. we talked about this on the show before. this is a weird binary distinction between domestic and foreign. a lot of issues overlap. i wonder if the experience of watching that debate last night you think going forward for 2016, have we seen the last finally of the foreign policy-specific debate? can we debate every issue at once? it s a great question. i think you can make a case, obviously, as you say, that in a globalized world where economic and social and all these issues from climate change to trade to jobs are all internationally intertwined you don t need that catego category. whatever title gets slapped on the debates going forward, they will use it for whatever suits the particular vote getting purposes that night live. so i do think there s a case for abolishing the category per se. i thought for example in the martha raddatz one, it felt off-key to me because of her comfort zone and her expertise to spend eight minutes on syria that night and not a word on american schools. so i do think we need to keep trying to refine these. i agree with you. i mentioned yesterday i think libya and iran were probe the most talked about topics in this presidential election debate season, when clearly not at the top of mine share for what voters are looking at. i wanted to turn to another topic you wrote about, matt, which is joe biden s friend, paul ryan. i ve actually been hearing from a fair number of moderate republicans that they re uncomfortable with paul ryan on the ticket. they think mitt romney s decision to put him on the ticket was poor judgment. they re unsure he s ready to be commander in chief, and one of the criticisms we heard a little bit last night was how weak romney is in terms of his experience on foreign policy and the fact that paul ryan also has no experience on foreign policy. has the president s team done enough to talk about legitimate concerns that voters have about paul ryan, his inexperience and his extreme positions on things like his budget? i think those are all fair and important points, krystal. ryan doesn t look like someone highly competent day one to step into the commander in chief s role. having said that, i don t think most voters decide based on that. the real shocker to me about the ryan presence on the ticket is that in the nbc poll that came out the day before yesterday, romney the romney ticket is leading obama with senior citizens by 60 to 35. even though ryan put the medicare issue, the social security issue front and center for the democrats in ways that they usually want it, when it comes down to the last the homestretch of a race, romney s wiping the floor with seniors right now. i think that s going to provoke some real soul-searching among democrats when we see how the dust clears from this election. you were sounds decidedly bearish on obama s chances in two weeks. i m very nervous about last night and the way it s going this morning. i don t pretend to be a guru on the get out the vote effort in ohio, but for the president s sake i hope it s world class. thanks for coming in. sure. let s quickly, state of the race? where does everyone think this is a day after the debate? i ll go ahead and agree with cnn s john king this morning who said the trend line is moving in romney s direction. he s better off this morning than he was the day before the first debate. i think that s probably true. then again, two weeks i know this is cliche, two weeks in a long time and actually a lot can happen in 14 days before the election. so we ll see if that momentum keeps going. we still have donald trump s big reveal. thanks for reminding me. i would never make this decision without hearing what donald has to say about it first. i would put a finer point on what you just said. yes, romney is in better shape today than he was before the first debate, but i don t think he s in better shape than he was a week or two weeks ago. i think the momentum of the first one brought him into a very, very slight lead in the national polls or a tie in the national horse racing. i don t think he s done anything for him since then, but at this point we have to look at the electoral college. there is clearly an obama advantage there in the states that decide this election. he s ahead by a substantial margin. it s not a huge margin but sfashl in the context of a very close race. we can explain in disconnect and we can put it up on the screen. let s compare regionally the breakdown of the vote between obama and mccain. look at this now. in the east a big obama win and in the midwest a solid win, solid win in the west and dead even in the south. let s look ar the most recent gallup data. he s dropping in the east, about the same in the midwest and not quite the same in the west. look at the south. they say obamafobia has gone through the roof in the reddest of the red portion of the country. i wonder if this is artificially inflating romney s national number to make it look closer than it is in the swing states. who said na? i haven t heard anybody else make this point on this show yet. what? i told you that two weeks. what? what? i agree with the bill yant steve kornacki s insightful and original analysis. i do think there s a decent chance that romney is going to win the popular vote and the president is to win the electoral college. he still has many more paths to victory. it does look like it s likely to come down to ohio. nate silver was writing about that today. i want to disagree a bit with matt miller s analysis just now. i don t think the president could have donnie better than he did in last night s debate. i thought he got stronger each debate. he was crisp and confident and knew what he was talking about. he was very clear. and romney, i agree with matt that he really came in trying not to scare people. i think the lasting image i think is that he felt unsure and uncomfortable and uncertain, and the line that the president kept repeating is he s all over the map. you need to be clear, if you re going to be a leader. i think that is something that resonates with swing voters. look, i don t think it s going to radically shift things, but i do think to your point the momentum that already slowed down i think could move now a bit more in the president s direction. we re in a skin-tight race, and i agree. the numbers in the south artificially romney s national number. obviously we come down to ohio, ohio, ohio where obama has a slight lead. he has a slight lead in several other key battleground states. i think it s going to come down to hawaii. maybe. or new hampshire. washington, d.c. we re talking about a battle between economic competence and likability. we re talking about a battle between white turnout and latino turnout. one of the things that keeps me from being keeps from being awake all night at night is the cleveland plane dealer, which has gone with the winner has endorsed barack obama. they talked about a reluctant rehire, which is the mood for a lot of people. 60% of the country wants a different administration the second time as you pointed out in that poll, but a lot of the people like him. women like to return the incumbent and give him another chance. the road to 270 is easier for obama, harder for romney. if obama gets ohio and wisconsin, game blouses. well. from where we are now to last night in boca, neck up in the spin, our favorite debate moments. where others fail, droid powers through.