The Occasional Observer

Obama seemed to have a touch of the Bidens, wriggling about in his chair, waving his hands dismissively and always – always – smirking in Romney’s direction. By contrast, Romney sucked up the abuse and retained a rigid poker face all night. He looked like a Commander in Chief; Obama looked like a lawyer. Who would you rather vote for?

...they agreed on the essentials, which were all about foreign policy. Romney refused to tackle Obama directly on Libya (I shouted at the TV that he should, but he just wouldn’t listen) and Fast and Furious seems to have been forgotten by the GOP. In everything else, Obama has become so homicidally neoconservative and Romney so desperately peaceful that they’ve met in the middle on most issues. Both would defend Israel in the event of an attack, both want out of Afghanistan in 2014 and neither would let Iran get the bomb....

Romney tried his darnedest to bring everything back to the economy and Obama seemed to say in every answer, “So what we need to do in the Middle East is talk more about how rubbish my opponent is.” It’s almost lucky that Obama isn’t running unopposed in this election because then he’d have nothing to run on at all.

We...have to judge this debate as part of the narrative arc of this season. Romney won the first debate by a mile. Because Romney’s win was so decisive, it sparked an image change: Americans started to think of him as presidential material. That’s why Obama winning the second debate by an inch made little impact – people were watching Romney not to see him land punches but to see how well he could take them. He won the third debate because, by the end of the night, his and Obama’s positions in the narrative arc had switched. Romney now looks like the President and Obama looks like the challenger.