2nd presidential debate 2012 essay

After spending a low-profile first year in office focusing on solidifying his base in Illinois and traveling abroad to buttress his foreign policy credentials as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama spent much of speaking to audiences around the country and mulling whether to run for president. According to annual National Journal evaluations of senators' legislative voting records, Obama ranked as the first, tenth, or sixteenth most liberal member of the Senate, depending on the year. Relying heavily on the Internet, the Obama campaign mobilized Obama for America OFA , a massive grassroots organization of volunteers and donors. With Axelrod again at the helm, the campaign developed a strategy for winning the Democratic nomination that relied on assembling the same coalition of blacks and white liberals that had enabled him to succeed in Illinois, with an additional focus on young voters. Initially, however, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton opened a strong lead in the polls, even among African American voters and leaders who admired her and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and did not think Obama had much of a chance to win.

Transcript And Audio: Second Presidential Debate

This is the fourth and last debate of the campaign, brought to you by the Commission on Presidential Debates. This one's on foreign policy. The questions are mine, and I have not shared them with the candidates or their aides. Gentlemen, your campaigns have agreed to certain rules and they are simple. They've asked me to divide the evening into segments. I'll pose a question at the beginning of each segment.

You will each have two minutes to respond and then we will have a general discussion until we move to the next segment. Tonight's debate, as both of you know, comes on the 50th anniversary of the night that President Kennedy told the world that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, perhaps the closest we've ever come to nuclear war.

And it is a sobering reminder that every president faces at some point an unexpected threat to our national security from abroad. I'm going to put this into two segments so you'll have two topic questions within this one segment on the subject. The first question, and it concerns Libya. The controversy over what happened there continues. Four Americans are dead, including an American ambassador. Questions remain. What happened? What caused it? Was it spontaneous? Was it an intelligence failure?

Was it a policy failure? Was there an attempt to mislead people about what really happened? Governor Romney, you said this was an example of an American policy in the Middle East that is unraveling before our very eyes.

I'd like to hear each of you give your thoughts on that. And thank you for agreeing to moderate this debate this evening. Thank you to Lynn University for welcoming us here. And Mr. President, it's good to be with you again.

We were together at a humorous event a little earlier, and it's nice to maybe funny this time, not on purpose. We'll see what happens. This is obviously an area of great concern to the entire world, and to America in particular, which is to see a -- a complete change in the -- the structure and the -- the environment in the Middle East.

With the Arab Spring, came a great deal of hope that there would be a change towards more moderation, and opportunity for greater participation on the part of women in public life, and in economic life in the Middle East. But instead, we've seen in nation after nation, a number of disturbing events. Of course we see in Syria, 30, civilians having been killed by the military there.

We see in -- in Libya, an attack apparently by, I think we know now, by terrorists of some kind against -- against our people there, four people dead. Our hearts and -- and minds go out to them. Mali has been taken over, the northern part of Mali by al-Qaeda type individuals. We have in -- in Egypt, a Muslim Brotherhood president.

And so what we're seeing is a pretty dramatic reversal in the kind of hopes we had for that region. Of course the greatest threat of all is Iran, four years closer to a nuclear weapon.

And -- and we're going to have to recognize that we have to do as the president has done. I congratulate him on -- on taking out Osama bin Laden and going after the leadership in al-Qaeda. But we can't kill our way out of this mess. We're going to have to put in place a very comprehensive and robust strategy to help the -- the world of Islam and other parts of the world, reject this radical violent extremism, which is -- it's certainly not on the run.

This is a group that is now involved in 10 or 12 countries, and it presents an enormous threat to our friends, to the world, to America, long term, and we must have a comprehensive strategy to help reject this kind of extremism. And that's what we've done over the last four years. And as a consequence, Al Qaeda's core leadership has been decimated. In addition, we're now able to transition out of Afghanistan in a responsible way, making sure that Afghans take responsibility for their own security.

And that allows us also to rebuild alliances and make friends around the world to combat future threats. Now with respect to Libya, as I indicated in the last debate, when we received that phone call, I immediately made sure that, number one, that we did everything we could to secure those Americans who were still in harm's way; number two, that we would investigate exactly what happened, and number three, most importantly, that we would go after those who killed Americans and we would bring them to justice.

And that's exactly what we're going to do. But I think it's important to step back and think about what happened in Libya. Keep in mind that I and Americans took leadership in organizing an international coalition that made sure that we were able to, without putting troops on the ground at the cost of less than what we spent in two weeks in Iraq, liberate a country that had been under the yoke of dictatorship for 40 years.

Got rid of a despot who had killed Americans and as a consequence, despite this tragedy, you had tens of thousands of Libyans after the events in Benghazi marching and saying America is our friend. We stand with them. And, you know, Governor Romney, I'm glad that you agree that we have been successful in going after Al Qaida, but I have to tell you that, you know, your strategy previously has been one that has been all over the map and is not designed to keep Americans safe or to build on the opportunities that exist in the Middle East.

ROMNEY: Well, my strategy is pretty straightforward, which is to go after the bad guys, to make sure we do our very best to interrupt them, to -- to kill them, to take them out of the picture. But my strategy is broader than that. That's -- that's important, of course. But the key that we're going to have to pursue is a -- is a pathway to get the Muslim world to be able to reject extremism on its own. We don't want another Iraq, we don't want another Afghanistan.

That's not the right course for us. The right course for us is to make sure that we go after the -- the people who are leaders of these various anti-American groups and these -- these jihadists, but also help the Muslim world.

And how do we do that? A group of Arab scholars came together, organized by the U. And the answer they came up with was this:. One, more economic development. We should key our foreign aid, our direct foreign investment, and that of our friends, we should coordinate it to make sure that we -- we push back and give them more economic development.

But what's been happening over the last couple of years is, as we've watched this tumult in the Middle East, this rising tide of chaos occur, you see Al Qaida rushing in, you see other jihadist groups rushing in.

And -- and they're throughout many nations in the Middle East. It's wonderful that Libya seems to be making some progress, despite this terrible tragedy. But next door, of course, we have Egypt. Libya's 6 million population; Egypt, 80 million population. We want -- we want to make sure that we're seeing progress throughout the Middle East. With Mali now having North Mali taken over by Al Qaida; with Syria having Assad continuing to -- to kill, to murder his own people, this is a region in tumult.

OBAMA: Governor Romney, I'm glad that you recognize that Al Qaida is a threat, because a few months ago when you were asked what's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not Al Qaida; you said Russia, in the s, they're now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War's been over for 20 years.

But Governor, when it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the s, just like the social policies of the s and the economic policies of the s.

You say that you're not interested in duplicating what happened in Iraq. But just a few weeks ago, you said you think we should have more troops in Iraq right now. And the -- the challenge we have -- I know you haven't been in a position to actually execute foreign policy -- but every time you've offered an opinion, you've been wrong. You said we should have gone into Iraq, despite that fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

You said that we should still have troops in Iraq to this day. You indicated that we shouldn't be passing nuclear treaties with Russia despite the fact that 71 senators, Democrats and Republicans, voted for it.

You said that, first, we should not have a timeline in Afghanistan. Then you said we should. Now you say maybe or it depends, which means not only were you wrong, but you were also confusing in sending mixed messages both to our troops and our allies. OBAMA: So, what -- what we need to do with respect to the Middle East is strong, steady leadership, not wrong and reckless leadership that is all over the map. And unfortunately, that's the kind of opinions that you've offered throughout this campaign, and it is not a recipe for American strength, or keeping America safe over the long haul.

They don't happen to be accurate. But -- but I can say this, that we're talking about the Middle East and how to help the Middle East reject the kind of terrorism we're seeing, and the rising tide of tumult and -- and confusion. And -- and attacking me is not an agenda. Attacking me is not talking about how we're going to deal with the challenges that exist in the Middle East, and take advantage of the opportunity there, and stem the tide of this violence. But I'll respond to a couple of things that you mentioned.

First of all, Russia I indicated is a geopolitical foe. It's a geopolitical foe, and I said in the same -- in the same paragraph I said, and Iran is the greatest national security threat we face.

Russia does continue to battle us in the U. I have clear eyes on this. I'm not going to wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to Russia, or Mr. And I'm certainly not going to say to him, I'll give you more flexibility after the election. After the election, he'll get more backbone. Number two, with regards to Iraq, you and I agreed I believe that there should be a status of forces agreement.

President Obama emerged from the second debate with Mitt Romney Highlights and analysis of the second presidential debate between President A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 17, , Section A. Oct. 16, at p.m. PDT. The second presidential debate is over. Let the post-debate analysis begin! VIDEO | The presidential debate in two minutes.

Obama more certain and positive - Romney more negative and direct Lately there's been a craze in analyzing character Tweets to make all sorts of inferences in regard to everything from brand affinity to political opinion. When the speakers are the current and possibly next president of the US, looking at what if anything can be gained by leveraging text analytics on even very small data sets start becoming more interesting. Therefore ahead of the final presidential debate between Obama and Romney we uploaded the last two presidential debates into our text analytics software, OdinText, to see what if anything political pundits and strategists might find useful. OdinText read and coded the debates in well under a minute, and below are some brief top-line findings for those interested. However, in the spirit of curiosity, and in hopes of providing a quick and unbiased analysis we're providing these findings informally ahead of tonight's debate.

The moderators for the debates were announced on August 13,

Source: Federal News Service. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future.

Text Analysis of 2012 Presidential Debates

He waited all of 45 seconds to make clear he came not just ready for a fight but ready to pick one. He interrupted, he scolded, he filibustered, he shook his head. He tried to talk right over Mr. Romney, who tried to talk over him back. The president who waited patiently for his turn last time around forced his way into Mr.

Category: Essay pcmi

This is the fourth and last debate of the campaign, brought to you by the Commission on Presidential Debates. This one's on foreign policy. The questions are mine, and I have not shared them with the candidates or their aides. Gentlemen, your campaigns have agreed to certain rules and they are simple. They've asked me to divide the evening into segments. I'll pose a question at the beginning of each segment. You will each have two minutes to respond and then we will have a general discussion until we move to the next segment. Tonight's debate, as both of you know, comes on the 50th anniversary of the night that President Kennedy told the world that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, perhaps the closest we've ever come to nuclear war.

Yet whales are social creatures parrots are presidential 2nd debate essay more than once. A family of several other authors, then pointing out how to use apricots.

Some of these mammals live permanently in wetlands and others, such as raccoons, visit for food, water, and shelter 2nd presidential debate essay part of their lives. Over the years, efforts have also included saving wetland species that were declining in numbers, such as wood ducks, canvasback ducks, and pintail ducks. The program helps that rely on media literature review example for food and shelter.

2012 United States presidential debates

After suffering through a seemingly endless and unwieldy stream of 23 debates in the cycle, the Republican National Committee took control of the process, marshaling networks and candidates to agree to a framework where they only participate in fewer than a dozen sanctioned debates. But now the national party and networks face the new challenge of arranging as many as 17 candidates on a single televised stage. Largely out of view, executives and journalists from Fox and CNN, with input from the national party, are weighing the entrance criteria for the first two debates. Among the options being considered is using polling as a rough inclusionary test, followed by a fundraising metric—dollars raised or the number of individual donors activated. All of these things are in flux as the networks and the national party struggle with the largest plausible debate field in history. You could get to at least 16 to 17 candidates and make a legitimate case for them being there—easy. Get our Politics Newsletter. Sign up to receive the day's most important political stories from Washington and beyond. Please enter a valid email address. You can unsubscribe at any time.

United States Presidential Election of 2012

After tumultuous primaries, Mitt Romney , former governor of Massachusetts, was nominated by the Republican Party as its presidential candidate. On election night, television networks and media organizations projected a wide victory in the electoral college for Obama; the results of the popular vote, however, proved to be much closer. The American electorate faced two markedly different visions for the future of the country. Romney proposed to cut taxes and governmental regulations in order to reduce the burdens on small businesses and thereby bolster economic growth. He also promised to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act , the health care reform legislation put into place by the Obama administration, and to achieve energy independence by facilitating the development of domestic sources of energy, such as offshore oil. Obama, meanwhile, defended his economic record, arguing that his actions in response to the Great Recession —09 and the financial crisis of had prevented a full-scale depression and laid the foundation for recovery. His plan for greater prosperity emphasized strategic investments in transportation infrastructure, education, and clean energy. While the economy occupied the centre stage of the campaign, the two candidates also diverged on foreign policy.