Chris
Matthews was apoplectic: "There's a hot debate going on in this
country, and you know where it's being held? Here, on this network, is where
we're having this debate. We have our knives out. We go after the people and
the facts. What was he doing tonight? He went in disarmed!"
Ed Schultz was “absolutely stunned.” The president, he proclaimed, made a “deal with the devil" by saying he agreed with Mitt Romney on Social Security. (“A somewhat similar position” is how Obama put it.) Ed was not brooking any of Rachel Maddow’s excuses about how Romney muscled in for time: “The president needs to go in there and fight for that time. There’s people out there who expect him to fight for that time.” (Another ideological illusion: According to one analyst, Obama actually got 11% more microphone time than Romney, while saying 9% fewer words. The problem wasn’t time. It was energy.)
