The Root, News Report, Posted: Oct 03, 2012

 The first presidential debate is finally here, and the once-nervous chatter of many inside the GOP has turned to outright groans about the state of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. From Peggy Noonan to Joe Scarborough to George Will, conservatives (myself included) have become increasingly anxious about a campaign in which the optics, the sound bites and even the polls are saying that this election is headed in the wrong direction for Republicans. Even Charles Krauthammer noted, "If we can't win this election, we should turn in our credentials as a political party."

As I've said for several months now, this election is and will be about the numbers: 23 million (unemployed), 8.2 percent (the unemployment rate), $16 trillion (U.S. debt) and 46 million (Americans living in poverty), along with 43 (the number of continual months of unemployment above 8 percent), 8 (the percentage by which individual incomes have shrunk since 2009) and the power combination of 11.2 percent (what the effective unemployment rate would be if people who have stopped looking for work were counted) and 8 million (the number who have quit looking for jobs since the "recovery" began).

But it is the numbers 47 (the percentage of Americans who, according to Romney, won't vote for him) and 14.1 (the effective tax rate that Romney paid in 2011 on his investment income) that seem to have captured the collective imagination of both the media and political worlds. Too bad for them that the rest of us live in the world fixated on the other numbers above. 

Read more here.