The NY Times on Obama and Romney

So I thought the Remarks by the President on the Economy in Cleveland, OH the other day were pretty good. The New York Times didn't quite agree:

"President Obama sometimes forgets that an important speech does not have to be endless. On Thursday, appearing before supporters at a Cleveland community college, he spent 53 minutes on the stark contrast between his goals and the failed Bush-era policies that Mitt Romney is trying to resurrect. It’s hard to imagine that the speech, overgrown as it was with policy details, won the hearts of many independent voters yearning for a clear understanding of how much is at stake in November."

They went further and this is pretty remarkable for an editorial in a major paper to use this language:

"And it is there that Mr. Obama still has not made his case. Mr. Romney’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites. The stimulus failed. (Three million employed people beg to differ.) The auto bailout was a mistake. (Another million jobs.) Spending is out of control. (Spending growth is actually lower than under all modern Republican presidents.) He says these kinds of things so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth. It is hard to challenge these lies with a well-reasoned-but-overlong speech."

They actually called out Romney for lying.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Times, Paul Krugman picked on a line that Romney said and then backed away from: We Don't Need No Education.

"In the remarks Mr. Romney later tried to deny, he derided President Obama: “He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers.” Then he declared, “It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”

You can see why I was ready to give points for honesty. For once, he actually admitted what he and his allies mean when they talk about shrinking government. Conservatives love to pretend that there are vast armies of government bureaucrats doing who knows what; in reality, a majority of government workers are employed providing either education (teachers) or public protection (police officers and firefighters)."

I thought the rest of piece was particularly good at providing some evidence based on our past and current European attempts to fix the economy.