Presidential Debate: Best Quotes of the Night

With an over 60 million viewers watching, Mitt Romney and President Obama dove deep into there first of three presidential debates Wednesday night. During which they also mixed in a couple zingers, a few jokes and a big shout out to Michelle Obama on her 20th wedding anniversary.  

ROUND ONE: ALL HUGS AND SMILES

Here are some of the best quotes from the candidates' first of three face-to-face showdowns.

1. Mitt Romney on Big Bird:  I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS," Romney said. "I'm going to stop other things. I like PBS, I love Big Bird. Actually, [I] like you, too. But I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for.
2. President Obama on Medicare Vouchers:  "If you're 54 or 55, you might want to listen because this will affect you. The idea, which was originally presented by Congressman Ryan, your running mate, is that we would give a voucher to seniors and they could go out in the private marketplace and buy their own health insurance. "The problem is that because the voucher wouldn't necessarily keep up with health care inflation, it was estimated that this would cost the average senior about $6,000 a year."
3. Mitt Romney on ending Obamacare:  "When you look at 'Obamacare,' the Congressional Budget Office has said it will cost $2,500 a year more than traditional insurance," Romney said. "So it's adding to cost. And as a matter of fact, when the president ran for office, he said that, by this year, he would have brought down the cost of insurance for each family by $2,500 a family. Instead, it's gone up by that amount. So it's expensive. Expensive things hurt families. So that's one reason I don't want it."
4. President Obama on Massachusetts Health Care:  "The irony is that we've seen this model work really well in Massachusetts because Gov. Romney did a good thing, working with Democrats in the state to set up what is essentially the identical model and, as a consequence, people are covered there," Obama said. "It hasn't destroyed jobs. And as a consequence, we now have a system in which we have the opportunity to start bringing down costs as opposed to just leaving millions of people out in the cold." "Gov. Romney said this has to be done on a bipartisan basis," Obama added. "This was a bipartisan idea. In fact, it was a Republican idea. And Gov. Romney, at the beginning of this debate, wrote and said what we did in Massachusetts could be a model for the nation. "And I agree that the Democratic legislators in Massachusetts might have given some advice to Republicans in Congress about how to cooperate. But the fact of the matter is we used the same advisers and they say it's the same plan."

Posted by Gabriel Lorden