While the left cheers President Obama’s second debate performance with the excitement of Chris Matthews on a prom date with The One, the fact remains that this was not just a bad debate for President Obama. It was a disastrous debate for President Obama. He may have achieved firing up the base, but the base had already been fired up by Vice President Joe Biden’s bizarre performance in the vice presidential debate. He may have achieved not looking comatose, but instead he looked angry and puerile.
Actually, Obama lost in three major ways.
Economy. The first loss is the most obvious. Mitt Romney absolutely dismembered Obama on economics. Obama wasn’t merely outclassed. He was out-leagued. Take, for example, the Romney-Obama exchange on gas drilling. After Obama blathered on about how he’d been great for oil supply (false), Romney gutted him with a single line:
The proof of whether a strategy is working or not is what the price is that you're paying at the pump. If you're paying less than you paid a year or two ago, why, then, the strategy is working. But you're paying more. When the president took office, the price of gasoline here in Nassau County was about $1.86 a gallon. Now, it's $4.00 a gallon.
Obama’s response was perhaps the worst economic gaffe in modern debate history:
Well, think about what the governor -- think about what the governor just said. He said when I took office, the price of gasoline was $1.80, $1.86. Why is that? Because the economy was on the verge of collapse, because we were about to go through the worst recession since the Great Depression, as a consequence of some of the same policies that Governor Romney's now promoting. So, it's conceivable that Governor Romney could bring down gas prices because with his policies, we might be back in that same mess.
