Debate: Obama was “that guy at the meeting surreptitiously checking his email”

That’s probably the best way to describe the poor debate performance of our celebrity President last night, and the description comes courtesy of one of his hometown papers the Chicago Tribune. Ouch. Nobody wants to be that guy, especially not on national TV.

Slate.com has a nice round-up of reactions from the MSM and punditocracy, and really none of them are good for the guy who wants you to trust him with the keys to the White House for another four years. Obama was so tripped up by Romney that he didn’t even mention the 47% remark, nor did the words “Bain Capital” even come up once in the debate.

My main thought throughout the debate was the fact that Romney came off as the clear adult in this race, the one who had a strong command of the issues, who could get things up and rolling again. He looked like he was passionately schooling a teenaged-smart a** who just graduated from high school who thinks he knows everything.

It was brutal. At times I almost felt sorry for the President. Almost.

Ok, well, not really. ;)

Romney wouldn’t let Obama distort his record and wouldn’t let moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS fame plump the President’s pillow in any way. This was about as close to a non-moderated Presidential debate as we will ever see in our respective lifetimes, and it was a perfect style of debate for Romney to come out swinging, to give voters who haven’t paid much attention to the race so far a chance to know who he is, while at the same time defining his opponent as someone who was clearly out of his depth who should never have been voted in as President in the first place, especially during a near-catastrophic economic downturn.

Focus group polling for undecideds on both Fox and CNN showed Romney to be the clear winner. MSNBC’s commentary crew looked like they needed to be put on suicide watch, especially Chris “Tingles” Matthews. Democrat strategist Joe Trippi said on Fox that Obama “looked sour.” And he did. As I noted yesterday, this President has a big time disdain for the debate process and, in fact, really does not like to be questioned at all. And let’s face it, for the last four years he has not been challenged much at all by the mainstream press, partly because most of them are in the tank for him, and partly because he holds so few pressers with the WH press corps in the first place.

Clearly, President Obama’s debate prep on “The View” did not help him at all last night. Aww.

All that being said, this race is not over. We have one more brutal month to go, two more Presidential debates, and one VP debate (next Thursday). O’Biden and their band of merry liars will regroup, and things are going to get much uglier. Romney just re-established himself last night as a viable contender for the Oval Office who will not wave the white flag when it looks like the polls are turning against him. More importantly, Mitt Romney demonstrated to the American people that he is not only passionate about undoing the damage from four years of Barack Obama’s disastrous economic policies, but also that he has the knowledge and experience to actually do it.

Isn’t that just what America needs?

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