Old thread was full. My preliminary take is that the president did fine. Romney got away with saying too much crap without consequence, but as I noted yesterday, the male pundits like it when someone bullies the moderator and otherwise acts aggressively, but most women and many men don’t like that. I thought the president did very well for the first third of the debate when he was talking about taxes. I thought he did a good job of defending ObamaCare. Somewhere around the hour mark, he seemed to lose a little focus on one answer and he never really got back in full stride, although his closing argument was strong. I am going to take a look at the focus groups before I come to any strong conclusions about winners and losers tonight. Romney can certainly feel good that his only major gaffe was blurting out that he loves Big Bird. But if fact-checkers do their job overnight and tomorrow morning, Romney is going to get a lot of negative press coverage to go along with the stuff about how his held his own.
Update [2012-10-4 0:2:54 by BooMan]: I’ve seen some snap polls now that look very good for Romney. I’m not one to put my independent judgment over real-time polls, so it looks like Romney had a clear first-impression win tonight. If you want a little positive spin, a very large majority in these snap polls thought either that Obama was a more attractive candidate or that the debate didn’t change their opinion at all. Romney won a strong plurality of the people who’s opinions were changed, but that was still a minority. The flip side of that is that Romney helped himself relative to the president. He appears to have made a positive impression on a sizable number of people, and so he should expect to get some improvement in the polls from this.
However, the post debate debate will get underway in earnest tonight, and it will cut two ways. First, Obama’s debate performance will be criticized. Second, Romney’s debate performance will be scrutinized. Each candidate will take their share of hits in that process. It’s our job to help in the scrutiny part of that process. Unfortunately, I will be traveling to the White House tomorrow and it will be a very light blogging day for me as a result.
One last happy thought. By doing well tonight, Romney reversed the expectations game for the next debate, which will be a town-hall format. Relating to the common folk has been a constant challenge for Romney and the town hall format will be hard for him. So there’s a little bit of winning by losing element you can console yourself with.
Also, Obama got his wake-up call. So, you know, he’s awake now.