Monday, September 24, 2012

Who won the 60 Minutes interviews?

Did Sunday's '60 Minutes' interviews with President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney help voters - the few who remain undecided - figure out who to push the button or pull the lever for in the November election? Unlikely. But it did give pundits another opportunity to chime in on who's winning the battle of the rhetoric.

Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin, who writes the conservative Right Turn blog, slams Obama:
"Once is a bad day, but twice in a row should worry Democrats. President Obama followed his gaffe-ridden Univision interview with an outing on Sunday on “60 Minutes” that is destined to wind up in a series of Mitt Romney ads."

The worst part of the interview was this, she said:

STEVE KROFT: “You don’t feel any pressure from Prime Minister Netanyahu in the middle of a campaign to try and get you to change your policy and draw a line in the sand? You don’t feel any pressure?”

OBAMA: “When it comes to our national security decisions — any pressure that I feel is simply to do what’s right for the American people. And I am going to block out — any noise that’s out there.” "Calling Netanyahu’s concern about an existential threat 'noise' is another in a long string of insults, snubs and gaffes about Israel. This remark immediately raised red flags in the foreign press.The Iranians were happy, though."

Amanda Terkel and Sam Stein of the Huffington Post took Romney to task, saying the former Massachussetts governor suggested that emergency room care suffices as a substitute for the uninsured.

"Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance," he said in an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS's "60 Minutes" that aired Sunday night. "If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care."

"This constitutes a dramatic reversal in position for Romney, who passed a universal health care law in Massachusetts, in part, to eliminate the costs incurred when the uninsured show up in emergency rooms for care," the HuffPost said. Indeed, the HuffPost dug up an old interview Romney had with Glenn Beck where Romney decried such emergency room care as a "form of socialism." Said Romney in 2007:  "So my plan (the Massachusetts health-care reform) did something quite different. It said, you know what? If people can afford to buy insurance ... or if they can pay their own way, then they either buy that insurance or pay their own way, but they no longer look to government to hand out free care. And that, in my opinion, is ultimate conservativism."

See the complete 60 Minute interviews  here.


6 comments:

Stick said...

You mean the interview Obama had or the one CBS played? They edited out the part in which he admitted some of his ads were not correct and over the top.

birdman said...

i liked the part where obama said he always takes full responsibilty. then he went on to blame everybody else for his job performance.

birdman said...

i liked the part where obama said he always takes full responsibilty. then he went on to blame everybody else for his job performance.

Garth Vader said...

Too bad Obama doesn't backup his allegedly "tough" talk on Israel with actual deeds. His foreign aid request for that country surpasses all previous amounts, and he signed a law committing the US to providing Israel with "military superiority".

It's really shocking to see how gullible people are in thinking that Obama is somehow "anti-Wall Street" (he hasn't prosecuted a single financial executive) and "anti-Israel" (see above).

faithplusnothing said...

Why is the Huffington Post not called a left wing blog but the Washington Post writer's blog is labeled conservative? Yeah, we already know....

Unknown said...

The right hand of Hillary Clinton was asked tough questions by the same reporter who did the story on General McChrysal back in 2010.

Now since you would think this is coming from the White House, they would not use the F word as in f off to a reporter but hey this is something you will not see in the media. http://www.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeedpolitics/hillary-clinton-aide-tells-reporter-to-fuck-off