Note: Several friends said: Have you forgotten that the President has more than a full time job running a dysfunctional country (pretty damn well considering) and if he is a little tired and distracted when going up against a full time campaigner and practiced liar it's no wonder he isn't providing you with your desire for entertaining fireworks. Despite this, there was plenty in the President's performance that deserves commendation. Unless your motivation is to help cause an upset, why don't you write a few positive sentences about what he did well? Romney said proudly in a campaign trail to a group of unemployment, “I am currently unemployed!” You may check his record for confirmation.Just for the record:
Obama says he was ‘too polite’ in first debate with Romney
By Olivier Knox, Yahoo! News
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President Barack Obama pauses as he speaks at a campaign event at The Ohio State University Oval on Tuesday (Carolyn …President Barack Obama said in an interview broadcast Wednesday that he was "just too polite" in his first debate with Mitt Romney—a new explanation for the incumbent's widely panned performance in that prime-time political bout.
"What happened in the debate? Everybody wants to know," radio host Tom Joyner asked Obama. "Was that some kind of genius strategy to rope-a-dope him in?"
The president ducked the Muhammad Ali comparison but said "I think it's fair to say I was just too polite" and promised to be more combative at the second and third debates, to be held October 16 and October 22. "We're going to take it to him."
Obama sought to reassure panicked Democrats who have watched as post-debate polls seem to show the race now narrowly in Romney's favor in battleground states.
"This was always going to be a close race," Obama insisted. "Governor Romney kept on making mistakes month after month so it made it look artificially like this was, might end up being a cakewalk. But we understood internally that it never would be."
"The good thing is that we've got a lead and Tom, you guys know a little bit about basketball. You know, you have a seven game series, we're up two zero and we lose one" he said.
Joyner cut him off: "Yeah, but you had the open shot and you didn't take it!"
"Yeah, I understand, but you know, what happens though is that when people lose one game, you know, this is a long haul," Obama said. "It's very important for folks to just make sure that they understand that as long as people stay focused we will win this thing."
"By next week I think a lot of the hand wringing will be complete because we're going to go ahead and win this thing," Obama said.
Obama tried to explain away his subdued performance in the debate.
"You know, it's hard to sometimes just keep on saying 'what you're saying isn't true,'" he said."It gets repetitive."
"But, you know, the good news is, is that's just the first one," the president said. "And, you know, I think it's fair to say that we will see a little more activity at the next one."
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Debbie 22 secs ago Report Abuse
WOO HOO! You know, I was thinking that since he can't strut on his own record - since his record sucks - that that's why he's deflecting to Romney's small mistakes and trying to make them huge. I never knew he had said that himself! Awesome. (I honestly try not to listen to him speak whenever I can possibly avoid it. Causes heartburn, headaches, and those little hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up just upon hearing his voice...)
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Max Passion • 10 mins ago Report Abuse
• Just let it go Obama. The damage has been done. The hole your campaign is digging is getting bigger and bigger. You had your Bill Buckner moment. 72users liked this commentRate a Thumb UpRate a Thumb Down7users disliked this comment
Obama's Stash • 21 mins ago Report Abuse
Obama gave us his 2012 election strategy....in his 2008 convention speech:
".... if you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from. You make a big election about small things."
Cue Big Bird.....
It's time to move on.
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Heff • 4 mins 26 secs ago Report Abuse
"Bush did it", "Big ditch", "You're racist", "It was the altitude", "Out of context", "European headwinds", "GOP", "Congress", "It was the movie", and now add "Too polite". THOSE ARE EXCUSES, NOT THE RESULTS WE WERE LOOKING FOR.
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Michael • 13 mins ago Report Abuse
Just a suggestion if Obama wants to write a book about anything besides himself. A compilation of all his excuses! It would be reminiscent of the Arabian Nights, with Sharazade making up a new story every night!
Sting Like a Butterfly
Posted by David Remnick
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My colleagues Amy Davidson and John Cassidy did a brilliant late-shift job of analyzing last night’s disastrous debate performance for President Obama: his I-don’t-wanna-be-here-please-get-me-outta-here manner; his barely-able-to-rouse-himself incapacity to pounce on Mitt Romney’s empty and contradictory policy prescriptions; his unwillingness even to craft a solid two-minute closing statement. This is a President who could easily have made the argument that he inherited a catastrophic economic collapse and, despite all kinds of duplicitous right-wing opposition, managed to rescue the country from a full-blown Depression; who saved the auto industry; who … well, you know the litany, even if the President could not bestir himself to recite it last night with any passion or precision.
We already know that Obama didn’t manage to talk effectively, if at all, about “the forty-seven per cent” or women or so many other things. So let’s talk sports.
While talking to friends, flipping around the usual channels, and clicking through the onrush of Twitter remarks and discussion, I heard more than a few sports analogies. What was Obama up to? Well, he was like Dean Smith’s old North Carolina basketball teams sitting on a lead and going into the time-wasting four-corners offense. He was like a modern football team playing a “prevent” pass defense. You heard about Barack Obama playing “rope-a-dope.” And this morning, Joe Scarborough, on MSNBC, compared Obama to Mike Tyson when he lost, inexplicably, in 1990, in Tokyo, to a tomato can named Buster Douglas.
Obama is an almost alarmingly fanatical sports fan. His visitors invariably come away impressed by his granular knowledge of the N.B.A., in particular. So when he gets around to assessing his own performance last night, he will know that these analogies have a certain familiar ring. Basketball teams that go into a four-corners, time-killing strategy too soon lose their momentum and sense of purpose; and they lose. Football teams that go into a prevent defense too soon give up way too much ground too quickly; and they lose. Buster Douglas beat Mike Tyson because Tyson was out of shape, cocky, and uninterested in training for a seemingly unworthy opponent. All of these resonate with Obama’s inexplicably wan performance last night.
What makes less sense is the analogy I’ve heard most often: the rope-a-dope comparison. In 1974, in Zaire, Muhammad Ali leaned on the ropes for several rounds against a powerful but lumbering slugger, George Foreman. In the process, Ali absorbed an ungodly amount of punishment. Here’s an early-round example:
But as all scholars of pugilism know, Foreman exhausted himself by banging away at Ali’s arms, gloves, and ribs, and, by the eighth round he was flailing at thin air. All the way, Ali was further depleting Foreman with what cornermen refer to as “sneaky” jabs, right leads, and left hooks. Finally, with twelve or so seconds left in the eighth round, with Foreman wobbly and vulnerable, Ali put an elegant end to it, knocking his opponent to the ground and onto what used to be called Queer Street. (Believe me, that term is hardly the only indefensible thing about boxing.)
Comparing Obama’s tactics last night to the rope-a-dope doesn’t work. Getting beaten up is not rope-a-dope. Because he was so passive, and because he never managed, or bothered, to turn any rhetorical energy against his opponent, Obama’s eighth round never came. He had a chance to put a lock on this Presidential race and he let it pass by. As a performer, Romney won the fight (even if his arguments were full of holes and hypocrisies, as Amy and John and many others rightly note). Now the G.O.P faithful will feel far greater energy than they did after the convention in Tampa, a greater sense of possibility. By early next week, the polls will tighten up.
There are, of course, more debates to come, and incumbents almost always lose the opening round. But there is no guarantee that Obama will improve markedly. He has myriad skills as a thinker, as a speaker, and as a President. But this episodic unwillingness to connect, to show up, while entirely human, puts him in peril. This strange incapacity is nothing new. On the floor of the Illinois State Senate, Obama often got whacked around, particularly by Democrats to his left. When he ran, unsuccessfully, for Congress, in 2000, he wasn’t much of a debater and, to my eye, at least, Hillary Clinton was sharper, hungrier, and clearer in 2008 than Obama. There are two debates left. Obama may not like the format. He may even harbor disdain for it. Too bad. If he keeps playing not to lose, he puts his Presidency and everything he cares about in jeopardy.
Photograph: AP.
• John Cassidy on why Romney won and how Obama can bounce back.
• Amy Davidson on the seven chances Obama missed.
• Steve Coll on the policy differences behind the debate.
• Transcript of debate live chat with New Yorker writers and editors.
Keywords
• Presidential Debates
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/obama-no-ali-in-debate.html#ixzz28vHbmkzn
73 comments | Add your comments
I think the rope-a-dope analogy is apt when you consider that President Obama was not trying to tire Romney out but may have been giving the governor an opportunity to say something controversial by allowing him to speak more. And Romney delivered. In the mainstream media, chatter about who fared better in the debate has been replaced with Big Bird. It’s all about Big Bird now. Big Bird was even on Saturday Night Live last night! So, Obama won even though he lost; Romney lost even though he won. The first debate is the equivalent to Rounds 1-5 in a prize fight, where rope-a-dope or not it makes sense to keep most of your powder dry. Look for President Obama to ramp up his aggressiveness in the next debate (Round 6-10) and then look for his best oratory in the final debate (Rounds 11-15), as he goes for the knockout. The last debate is likely all most will remember when they head to the polls. And if you’re like me, and a growing number of voters, you have already voted, thus relegating all of this as nothing more than theatre.
Posted 10/7/2012, 8:19:41pm by AMoore1
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Romney is the GOP's JFK.
Posted 10/6/2012, 11:55:37pm by AlgerHiss
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I agree the rope-a-dope analogy is weak, although remember that a large part of Ali's strategy was to undermine Foreman psychologically, not just to wear him down physically. By belittling Foreman's strength ("Is that all you got, George? Can't you hit harder than that?"), Ali took away the only real weapon his opponent possessed: that other fighters were always afraid of being hit by him. But the Obama team is playing a different kind of long game. I think they're well aware that Obama can be his own worst enemy when he tries to come on strong in a debate (he got slammed for coming across as arrogant and cocky against Hillary Clinton in 2008), and that the President could afford to take a mild hit in order to further 2 main objectives: #1- Keep the base engaged and Democratic turnout efforts and fundraising up. If the Dems think Romney has a chance of actually winning, local voter turnout efforts will increase, especially in the all-important swing states. Complacency can be an incumbent's worst enemy. #2- Get some choice soundbites of Romney contradicting almost every previous statement he's made during the campaign, and change the conversation to, "Who is Mitt Romney, and how can we possibly trust him- on anything?"
Posted 10/6/2012, 1:00:06pm by Turalura
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Michael Jordan was sometimes over confident it is true but in the big games he never came out flat. I am as big an Obama supporter as any here but I was beginning to expect him near the end to look at his watch.
Posted 10/5/2012, 5:12:07pm by BenDuke44
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ad hominem, caspary
Posted 10/5/2012, 4:58:06pm by mimm
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Hey LowellTT, How far have we fallen that 7.8% unemployment guarantees your election? Especially when the numbers are heavily skewed to part-time and government workers? Besides, when you analyze an economy---you do not solely base it on unemployment. Does a one month figure discount the fact that our deficit has increased by 100%, that we are artificially deflating our currency and encouraging inflation by artificially pumping millions upon millions into the economy every month? Does it make up for the fact that gas is twice as expensive, and that the cost of everyday items has increased dramatically under his tenor. Does it make up for the fact that median incomes have dropped sharply? It is this sort of intellectual simplicity---which is shrouded in superb vocabulary in the New Yorker---that is the real problem. So Obama spends 800 billion on a stimulus, many more billions bailing out a car company that now makes un-profitable cars, many more billions pouring money into a "green energy" sector that is basically just his hand picked favorites, and then keeps interest rates at zero and artificially prints money every month, devaluing the dollar!!!! And you think that because unemployment drops .2% that changes everything? Sir, the man has not been able to get a budget passed in 4 years. In addition to the above economic idiocy he has created massive uncertainty with multitudes of continuing resolutions, a fiscal cliff that has not been addressed, and a healthcare plan that is unpopular with almost anyone that actually reads it. Quote BB King when you talk about blues music--not policy. Get your head straight.
Posted 10/5/2012, 4:35:05pm by McClain
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Hey Dave, Obama is notoriously self-confident - and a great admirer of another great Chicago athlete you curiously forgot to mention - Michael Jordan. As a fellow AfAm Chicagoan, the writer of the recent book, "African Americans in Chicago" and a recovering adman, I can only say, in the words of that great political advisor, B.B. King - "looks like you (and your Monday morning pundits) made your move too soon" Obama must have known the new unemployment figure would do his talking for him. 7.8% gets the last line in the debate...and probably the election. Right? http://buythecover.com
Posted 10/5/2012, 3:23:34pm by lowellt
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Not a bad article, but flawed in the sense that it compared the Thrilla to Round 1 of the Debates. Obviously, the President was surprised by Romney's tactic. That element of surprise is now lost and Romney will have to explain in detail to the Professor how he 1. expects his nonsensical "plan" to work, 2. how he can repudiate all of his prior statements wholesale, and 3. whether or not anyone should trust him given his willingness to deny his own documented statements. Which is to say that Romney went for a knockout in round 1 and didn't get it, not even close. Round 2 (Biden) and 3 and 4 will be very different as the manic Romney ties himself in knots while the Professor lets him flail.
Posted 10/5/2012, 3:10:56pm by pbh51
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Daronson, while it is true that to the fighters in the ring and the judges who were at ringside Ali may have seen to be in control,most people worldwide saw the fight on closed circuit broadcast. From this less privileged vantage, you can believe me, it looked like Foreman was destroying Ali. Remember he had taken out the two men Ali could never convincingly beat in less than two rounds and that Ali was considered to be well past his prime.We saw Ali delivering the odd straight right but mostly focused on Foreman, who we considered unbeatable, belaboring Ali on the ropes (where we all believed he could not be if he was to have any prayer of winning). Even in the clip in the 8th round it looks bad for Ali if you try to look at it without knowledge of what is to come only seconds before the end of the round. It is to this satellite TV audience that the impression of miracle turnaround was formed.
Posted 10/5/2012, 2:12:36pm by BenDuke44
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Sports are for entertainment. You are promoting a dangerous trend by this poor sports analogy that votes should be awarded to whomever who seemingly delivers a knockout punch. Have you forgotten that the President has more than a full time job running a dysfunctional country (pretty damn well considering) and if he is a little tired and distracted when going up against a full time campaigner and practiced liar it's no wonder he isn't providing you with your desire for entertaining fireworks. Despite this, there was plenty in the President's performance that deserves commendation. Unless your motivation is to help cause an upset, why don't you write a few positive sentences about what he did well?
Posted 10/5/2012, 12:58:16pm by Jambrone1
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/obama-no-ali-in-debate.html#ixzz28vJQtirl
Rope-a-dope
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"Ropeadope" redirects here. For the American record label, see Ropeadope Records.
The rope-a-dope is a boxing fighting style commonly associated with Muhammad Ali in his 1974 Rumble in the Jungle match against George Foreman.
In competitive situations other than boxing, rope-a-dope is used to describe strategies in which one party purposely puts itself in what appears to be a losing position, attempting thereby to become the eventual victor.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Origin of the term
• 2 Technique
• 3 Notable fights
• 4 In popular culture
• 5 References
[edit] Origin of the term
According to Angelo Dundee, the idea for the strategy against Foreman was suggested by boxing photographer George Kalinsky, "Sort of a dope on the ropes, letting Foreman swing away but, like in the picture, hit nothing but air." Publicist John Condon then polished the phrase into "rope-a-dope".[1]
[edit] Technique
The rope-a-dope is performed by a boxer assuming a protected stance (in Ali's classic pose, lying against the ropes; by leaning against the ropes, much of the punch's energy is absorbed by the ropes' elasticity rather than the boxer's body) while allowing his opponent to hit him, providing only enough counter-attack to avoid the referee thinking the boxer is no longer able to continue and thus ending the match via technical knockout. The plan is to cause the opponent to "punch himself out" and make mistakes which the boxer can then exploit in a counter-attack.
[edit] Notable fights
The maneuver is most commonly associated with the match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, known as the Rumble in the Jungle. Foreman was considered by many observers to be the favored to win the fight due to his superior punching power. During the match Ali purposely angered Foreman, provoking the latter to attack and force him back on the ropes. At the time some observers thought that Ali was being horribly beaten and worried that they might see him get killed in the ring. Writer George Plimpton described Ali's stance as like "a man leaning out his window trying to see something on his roof." However, far from being brutalized, Ali was relatively protected from Foreman's blows. Ironically, Ali's preparation for the fight, which involved toughening himself up by allowing his sparring partners to pummel him, contributed to observers' sense that Ali was outmatched. When Foreman became tired from the beating he was delivering, Ali regrouped and ended up winning the match.
Eight-division world champion Manny Pacquiao skillfully used the strategy to gauge the power of welterweight titlist Miguel Cotto in November 2009. Pacquiao followed up the rope-a-dope gambit with a withering knockdown.
Nicolino Locche, Argentine boxer nicknamed "El Intocable" (The Untouchable), used this technique extensively throughout his career. He would get against the ropes and dodge nearly every single punch until his opponent would tire, then he would take him down with combinations.
"Irish" Micky Ward utilized this strategy during many of the fights in the later part of his career. Ward would wait for his opponent to become fatigued and would hit with either a left hook to the body or any number of other combinations. This strategy led him to the junior welterweight championship of the WBU where he took the belt from Shea Neary.
罗姆尼究竟说了什么话?大鸟又就是是什么呢?他在辩论中被问及如果削减财政赤字时对美国公共广播电视服务公司(Public Broadcasting Service简称为PBS)的主管Jim Lehre(吉米·乐赫)说:“I'm sorry Jim. I'm gonna stop the subsidy to PBS. I'm gonna stop other things, I like PBS, I like Big Bird, I actually like you too. ”就是这段话目前在美国引起轩然大波,令美国大选峰回路转。
Fall in Jobless Rate Strips Romney of Simple Argument
Oct. 5, 2012, 6:30 p.m. PDT
The Washington Post News Service with Bloomberg News
(c) 2012, The Washington Post.
For Mitt Romney, it was the number that proved everything. Since the very first speech of his campaign, the Republican candidate has used a simple figure to bolster his argument that President Barack Obama couldn't fix the U.S. economy: 8 percent.
In this campaign, begun in the midst of a staggering downturn, monthly unemployment reports have been a running scorecard. They distill a vast and complicated economy down to terms simple enough for a stump speech: a number and a direction, up or down.
For Romney, any number above 8 percent proved he was right and Obama was wrong.
Obama had promised, Romney told audiences repeatedly, never to let unemployment get that high. Instead, Romney said, the jobless rate blew past 8 percent and got stuck there.
Until Friday.
The 0.3 percent dip in unemployment in September, from 8.1 to 7.8 percent, deprived Romney of one of his central campaign themes.
It was enough to put him on the defensive just as he was basking in the afterglow of his debate performance Wednesday, the best moment of his campaign against Obama so far. It wasn't because the figures showed a healthy economy — they didn't — but because the economy had crossed a threshold that Romney had implied it would never cross without him.
"We can do better," Romney said Friday at a rally in the Virginia coal-country town of Abingdon. It was the same argument he has used throughout the campaign, but without the number he'd always used to hammer it home. "There were fewer new jobs created this month than last month. And the unemployment rate . . . has come down very, very slowly, but it's come down nonetheless."
The political importance of the 8 percent threshold was driven home, in a backhanded way, by a few conservatives who floated a conspiracy theory that Friday's dip had been engineered to give Obama a boost.
Former General Electric chief executive Jack Welch wrote on Twitter: "these Chicago guys will do anything. can't debate so change numbers."
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the data were worked out the same way as always, with no interference. And Welch later conceded that he had no evidence of a conspiracy.
There is no special economic magic to 8 percent. A truly healthy economy, experts say, would have a rate far lower.
"Eight is bad, 7.9 is bad, 8.1 is bad," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and an adviser to GOP nominee John McCain in 2008. "We want to be at six."
But the figure assumed its political significance in early 2009, before Obama had taken office, in a report written by a pair of his advisers, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein. That report projected, with caveats, that if Congress passed a large stimulus package, unemployment would peak at 8 percent.
The stimulus passed. But the rate kept going up.
It reached 10 percent in October 2009 and then fell only slowly, despite the billions pouring in from the government. Before last month, the rate had hovered between 8.3 and 8.1 percent. Obama's advisers later said they had not understood the depth of the country's economic troubles when they made their projection.
The figure became one of the constants in Romney's stump speeches and fundraising talks: It meant that Obama had failed, even by his own standards.
"We've had 43 straight months with unemployment above 8 percent," Romney said in closing in the Denver debate.
Obama appeared Friday at campaign rallies in Cleveland and at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., evidently still smarting from his poor performance in Wednesday's debate. He seemed to be throwing out comebacks to Romney that he wished he'd thought of on the debate stage back in Denver.
"Someone is finally getting tough on Big Bird!" Obama said, responding a day and a half later to Romney's promise to take federal funding from PBS.
But he was clearly heartened by the job numbers, citing them as proof that he is the right leader to guide the economy.
"Today's news should give us some encouragement. It shouldn't be an excuse for the other side to try to talk down the economy just to try to score a few political points," Obama said in Cleveland. "It's a reminder that this country has come too far to turn back now."
The dip in the jobless number was caused, in part, by a surprising jump in one measure of employment.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, a branch of the Labor Department, uses two main sources. One is a survey of 141,000 businesses. The other looks at 60,000 households, asking if the people in those households were working or looking for work in the last month. The household survey captures data that the business survey doesn't, such as people who are self-employed or who work on farms.
The September survey of businesses indicated a relatively modest gain in hiring: Payrolls rose by about 114,000. But the household survey indicated a much greater boost in hiring, with about 456,000 people no longer unemployed.
The number of newly employed people in that survey jumped by the largest amount in nearly three decades. On Friday, economists said that it was probably an exaggeration, an outlier made possible by a relatively small sample.
"The numbers just seem too big to be real real. But everything moved in the right direction," said Chad Stone of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. "These numbers really do jump around a lot. You never want to read too much into one month's unemployment data, because the next month could look really different."
The data for October will be released Nov. 2, four days before Election Day.
On Friday, Welch's suggestion that the numbers were fixed was picked up by a few conservatives. The most prominent was Rep. Allen B. West, R-Fla., who posted on his Facebook page: "Somehow by manipulation of data, we are all of a sudden below 8 percent unemployment, a month from the presidential election."
That assertion was denied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles its reports in an intense and highly secretive process,carefully guarding access to the data before the official release. The bureau currently has no political appointees; its interim director is a career civil service employee.
On CNBC on Friday morning, Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said it was "ludicrous" to suggest that the data have been manipulated to boost Obama.
"I'm insulted when I hear that, because we have a very professional civil service organization where you have top, top economists that work at the BLS," Solis said. "They've been doing these calculations. These are our best-trained and best-skilled individuals working in the BLS, and it's really ludicrous to hear that kind of statement."
Later in the day, Welch told MSNBC's Chris Matthews that he had no hard evidence that the data had been fudged.
But he said he stood by his suspicions.
"I don't want to take back one word in that tweet," Welch said. "These numbers defy logic."
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Rucker reported from Abingdon, Va. David Nakamura and Nia-Malika Henderson contributed to this report.