TIME MAGAZINE’S MARK HALPERIN: “I just want to say one thing we haven’t brought up yet, but it’s incredibly important. The President did not lay out a second-term agenda. And if there’s an undercurrent here, that could really hurt him, not in the room, because it wasn’t evident, it was absent. He didn’t lay out a second term agenda any more than he did in the first debate. And that is where he is the weakest. And he didn’t address it, I thought at all.”
MSNBC’S JOE SCARBOROUGH: “Looking for a way forward, you want to know what’s going to be different over the next four years and you just didn’t get that from Barack Obama. And I’ve just got to think after the second debate this president has laid out no plan for the next four years. No plan. That’s got to be devastating in some voters’ eyes.”
NBC NEWS’ DAVID GREGORY: “I think liberals can breathe a sigh of relief. It’s not curtains for the president. He showed up and showed up big tonight. He was more aggressive; he had a lot of fight in him. A little light on his vision for the future.”
CNN’s JOHN KING: “If people think you have a plan, likability comes into play. The president has still left a whole lot of people, as I’ve been traveling the last few weeks, this is what people say, I want to vote for him, but he hasn’t told me what he’s going to do.”
NEW YORK TIMES’ TOM FRIEDMAN: “I continue to believe Obama has a weakness when it comes to the question of will the next four years really be different? Do you have a plan that excites you and me to get out of my chair and say that’s the guy, that’s it, that’s the person I want to follow now. He has not closed that deal.”
POLITICO’S BEN WHITE: “But Obama was far less effective in making an affirmative case for a second term, saying only that he wanted to create more manufacturing jobs and reduce the debt and deficit and keep investing in alternative energy sources. Romney had his strongest moments ripping up Obama’s first term record, citing the persistently high jobless rate, the rising debt and the lack of action on Social Security, Medicare and immigration reform. Obama mainly tried to refresh his campaign’s initial – and largely successful – disqualification effort against Romney rather than making a strong pitch for a second term vision.”
WSJ EDITORIAL: “Judging by Tuesday’s debate, the president’s argument for re-election is basically this: He’s not as awful as Mitt Romney. Mr. Obama spent most of his time attacking either Mr. Romney himself (he invests in Chinese companies), his tax plan as a favor for the rich (‘that’s been his history’) or this or that statement he has made over the last year (‘the 47%,’ which Mr. Obama saved for the closing word of the entire debate).”
FORMER NEW YORK GOV. ELIOT SPITZER: “We shouldn’t be blind to what continues to be the soft underbelly of the president’s campaign, which is that when all is said and done, you didn’t leave last night with a real tangible sense of what the second term agenda is going to be.”
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