Well, the consensus is that Obama shat the bed. Personally, I’m not too worried about it. Both candidates got into the weeds of kicking numbers back and forth pretty quickly, which reads one way to people who have been paying attention for months (and have already decided who to vote for), but will just confuse and bore people who haven’t been. I don’t see this having much impact on undecideds.

Still, it was a surprisingly bad performance from Obama, especially since he had an opportunity to really trounce Romney and sew up his victory. The problem, as far as I can tell, is that Obama didn’t really have a strategy to deal with Romney blatantly lying. I know it’s a bit of “common sense” wisdom in America that politicians lie all the time, but in reality, that’s not exactly true. Politicians embroider or cherry-pick or throw up distractions or even say things they think are true but are misinformed, but bald-faced lying is actually not that common. Or it wasn’t until this election, anyway. After the RNC, it became clear that simply lying about their positions and policies was going to be the Romney/Ryan strategy, with the hopes that by the time the fact-checkers had rendered a verdict, most of the voters they are appealing to had tuned back out again.

Romney kicked of the debate with a blatant lie. He denies that he intends to cut taxes for the rich on the backs of the middle class, but this is simply a lie. Not a hedge, not a tall tale. A lie. This is having your spouse catch you naked in bed with someone else and telling them that they’re simply imagining the person in the bed level of lie.