Presidential Championship Bout!

Round one on the debates is over and done with and Obama got stomped pretty bad out there.  He looked like he wanted to be anywhere else but on that stage.  There was a lot of build up to this debate, and many of his supporters were confident that their image of Obama the amazing orator was going to come out onto that stage and mop the floor with Mitt Romney.  Didn't happen.  Then there was a period of silence as those supports tried to make sense out of what had just happened.  Then the excuses started flying.

It was the altitude of being up in Denver.

He was playing "rope-a-dope".

There was a strange sudden onset of narcolepsy.

Those of you that have followed me for a while know I'm a fight guy.  When you have two guys going after each other in the ring most likely someone is going to get beat.  There's always those post fight interviews with the guy who loses, and often the guy who lost has some sort of excuse.  It really just makes them look like a bitch.  If you get beat, you should just admit it graciously, and go back to the drawing board to try harder.  Political fighting is different from real fighting of course, so if you get beat you'e supposed to make excuses, and try to spin things.

The day after the election Obama goes out and says "That wasn't the real Mitt Romney."

Really?  In that case Bizarro Mitt Romney done kicked your ass.  The thing with this campaign is the Obama camp has been trying very hard to define who Mitt Romney is.  They've painted a picture of an old fuddy-duddy who can't connect with people and only cares about rich folks.  It looks like they've actually bought into that too.  That wasn't smart because if you start having a lot of delusions about who your opponent is and buy into them, you are going to be in for a world of hurt when your real opponent shows up.  Romney came off charming, intelligent and in command.  The guy looked presidential.  Whether you agree with him or not on issues, he was outstanding in that debate.

We have a serious miscalculation by Obama in this round.  But really, there wasn't much hope for him to win an economic debate with Mitt Romney.  Where do we go from here?

Next week is the debate between the Joe Biden and Paul Ryan.  Not a very good follow up if you're camp Obama.  Biden is prone to gaffes and has a history of making comments that don't totally jive with the administration's agenda.  Really, all they can hope for is that Biden doesn't say anything that hurts the campaign.  So, if this week Biden doesn't makes things worse then he's succeeded in his job.

That'll take us to the final two debates between Obama and Romney.  One of those is going to be on foreign policy.  Typically those favor the incumbent, but right now, its really shaky.  If you had asked me last month if Obama had that one in the bag with the bin Laden trump card I'd have had to say "yes".  Doesn't matter that it was the intelligence gathering techniques that Obama himself objected to that led directly to the mission being possible.  The meme of "Obama got Osama" has caught on as if the president himself had pulled the trigger.

But now we've had the terrorist attack which killed our people in our embassy, including our ambassador.  Obama was running around saying it was the result of an anti-Islamic film and it was protest that got out of hand when it was obvious to anyone following the story that it was a terrorist attack.  Protesters don't bring RPGs.  There's records that the ambassador requested more security and it was denied.  The scene as of this writing has not been secured by the FBI, so its possible that sensitive documents that could endanger more people are out in the open.  To make things worse for the President, its out that he doesn't attend many of his security briefings.  Skipping out on meeting with foreign leaders to go on The View doesn't help either.

Its really not looking good for the Obama camp.  There's a ton of openings for Romney to exploit.  Still, in the fight game there's a saying: "You never want to leave it in the hands of the judges."  In politics, its almost always going to be in the hands of the judges, and we hope the judges (being the voters of course) are paying close attention.