THE DEBATE

Michael Barone:

The most important thing about these debates is that they give voters an idea of which candidate can take command for an office one of whose titles is commander-in-chief. Romney, in his interactions with Lehrer and with Obama, established that he is a man who can take command. Obama, through the whole debate, seemed like a man who cannot. Romney took command tonight and Obama looked irritable and weak. Americans don’t usually want irritatble and weak leaders as their commanders-in-chief.


Which one looked more like a president? Mitt Romney.

Joe Klein of Time Magazine"

Well, I’m with all the other talking heads: Mitt Romney won this debate. Barack Obama lost it. I mean, he got his butt kicked. It was, in fact, one of the most inept performances I’ve ever seen by a sitting President.......

 Did the President send out his body double to this debate? Because if that were the actual Barack Obama out there, I’m not sure he could communicate well enough to be an effective President in a time of trouble, to say nothing of winning a second term.

Chris Matthews of MSNBC:

"I don't know what he was doing out there. He had his head down, he was enduring the debate rather than fighting it. Romney, on the other hand, came in with a campaign. He had a plan, he was going to dominate the time, he was going to be aggressive, he was going to push the moderator around, which he did effectively, he was going to relish the evening, enjoying it,"

Tom Brokaw of NBC NEWS:

You know this is the most important debate of the campaign. Everybody has been saying that, including his advisers. Get it together, you're the President of the United States. You have all these resources that you can draw on, he's been over in Nevada prepared for it and then he showed up or didn't show up, depending on your point of view, and was utterly inadequate. It seemed to me, if he had shown up for a morning briefing at the White House in July of this year on a Thursday, on a routine day, he would had been more engaged than he was last night,

Charles Krauthammer:

It's not just that it energizes his base, I think what's important here is that people who have heard millions of dollars worth of ads about Romney, that he's the Gordon Gekko of our time, that he wants to inflict the pain on the middle class, look at this guy and say, 'He's got no horns. He's a guy that has ideas, some of them perhaps are wrong. But he's got some concern for the country, he's got ideas and he knows his stuff.' So I think it helps to wipe away a lot of that advantage that Obama's had from this huge amount of advertisement that you've seen in the swing states and I think that we might begin to see some slight narrowing. Perhaps a point or two, but that's all you need to change the direction of an election with a month to go.

From a friend by email after debate :

Obama blames Bush for his debate debacle

Romney was on top of his game....Eastwood's chair showed up in place of Obama.

A picture is worth a thousand words!