Zing-a-Ding-Ding

Since the President's staff apparently wasn't up to the task, or may just wasn't paid attention to, a critique and some advice from an old high-school debater.

(1)Pick a strategy: rope a dope didn't work. Either attack or propose something new, dramatic and specific, or better both. Romney has been a mass of contradictions, home in on that.

(2)Your naturally elliptical speaking style may be useful in some contexts, but debate isn't one of them. Practice and memorize some concise and pointed critiques. Some examples:

-Mr. Romney has promised some changes to the tax code, cutting everybody's rates by 20% and his own already low rates to near zero. He has also promised to do this in a revenue neutral way, which sounds like not cutting taxes at all, or maybe just moving taxes from guys like him to guys like you. When we ask him how he will perform this miracle, he won't tell, it's a secret, you see. These are details, we should concentrate on his principles. So what are those principles: tell whomever he is talking to just what he thinks they want to hear.

-Mr. Romney is going to balance the budget. How? Well he going to defund Sesame Street. That should save a few trillion. And, oh yeah, he going to kill the Affordable Care Act, taking health insurance away from 50 million Americans.

-Mr Romney wants to "privatize" a lot of things - Medicare, Schools, Prisons and so on. The Bush-Romney-Ryan version of "privatization" consists of sticking a big hose from the nation's treasury into the pockets of private contractors. The taxpayers pay, the contractors profit, and, if we are lucky, some of the money will go into providing schools, medical care, and so on. That's not capitalism, that's kleptocracy.

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