It's like they say, some days you eat the bear and some days the bear eats you.
At the first Presidential debate last evening, Mitt Romney was a grizzly and Barack Obama was, well, bear chow.
I admit that I was stunned with how badly President Obama performed. I'm also stunned that even the biggest Obama supporters are publicly admitting how badly he did.
If Obama's debate performance was a gymnastics move, it would have been a face plant. If it was a jump shot, it would have been an air ball. If it was .... well, you get the idea.
The real question is what will last night mean?
Obama's performance might have been the worst performance in a Presidential debate since Kennedy thumped Nixon in 1960. It was also strangely reminiscent of the now infamous 1992 Clinton/Perot/Bush debate when then- President Bush was caught looking at his watch. Both Nixon and Bush went on to lose.
At the same time, President George W. Bush had a less than stellar first debate with John Kerry in 2004 and yet went on to win.
I don't know if last night's debate will ultimately turn out to be a game changer. At the same time, I think momentum has definitely shifted, for the moment, to the Romney campaign. If nothing else, I think Romney showed undecided or persuadable voters that he's not the monster that the negative ads have painted him out to be.
It seems to me that if people vote with the pocketbooks as they often do, Romney has a chance. Up until last night, Obama was winning with the people who vote based on the cult of personality. For a lot of those voters, I think many came away from the debate with a different (and better) view of Governor Romney.
We may well look back five weeks from now and view last night's debate as the high point of Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign. Still, for Romney supporters, it was a glorious evening.
I have a friend who, on the morning after rough bad evenings, is fond of saying that he "feels like he was eaten by a coyote and you-know-whated over a cliff". At the close of the debate last night, Governor Romney was the coyote and President Obama was yelling "look out below"!
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