Recap

If you think about it, last night's debate shouldn't have been that much of a surprise.  Preparing to debate Mitt Romney is like preparing for a boxing match against a southpaw, only when you get to the match, instead of fighting a lefty, you're wrestling a bear.  George Costanza once famously said it's not a lie if you believe it.  Similarly, you can't really prepare to debate Mitt Romney if even Mitt Romney doesn't know what he'll be believing and saying on any given day.

As someone who's been paying attention this whole time, I have a hard time declaring Mitt the winner, because I know he spent much of the debate, um, getting creative with reality.  But I will say this, the strategy was brilliant.  Everyone thought Mitt was walking into a trap.  The President was going to ask Mitt to explain how he's going to pay for his $5 trillion tax cut and Mitt would have to either give an explanation people would hate or refuse to give an explanation again, which people would also hate.  There's no way anyone could have anticipated Mitt just saying "Tax cut! What tax cut?  What is this crazy man talking about?".  I may be paraphrasing. 

For the President's part, I'm not sure what he could have done.  I know people wanted him to fight back more and call Romney out on his bullshit, but how does that really go?  Do you think the President does better if he spends the whole night whining about how Romney is distorting things and lying?  I don't know.  I like condescending, arrogant, dismissive Barack Obama (honestly, he's my favorite Barack Obama), but I'm fairly confident the Obama campaign has polling that says most people hate that shit.  

There's a great West Wing episode about a Presidential debate.  The campaign team sees polling that says people will think President Bartlet is arrogant no matter what he does, so then they tell him to just go be himself and he crushes Rick Perry, er...Rob Ritchie.  That's a nice story, but that's not really how it works.  In reality, doing the thing that people expect you to do that they hate only makes more people hate you, and hate you more. 

I think the President's strategy, which he had to think of all on his own because, again, there's just no preparing for Mitt Romney, was to let Mitt punch himself out with nonsense and let the fact-checkers and the media kill him for it afterwards.  Obviously, there were a couple of flaws in the President's plan.  Number one, people don't care that much about facts.  Especially undecided voters.  They barely even know what country they live in.

Number two, trusting the media to actually do their job was a HUGE mistake.  HUUUUGGGEE!!  I hardly watched any of the post-debate coverage because I was too busy reading through my blog and pretending I care if things are spelled correctly, but the little pieces I heard were ridiculous, especially from a media that's supposed to be in the tank for Obama.  Here's what I heard from the media after the debate:

1) Mitt Romney's masterful and commanding performance.  Really?  All he did was lie and smirk.  I can do that anytime I want.  Can I be President now?

2) The President was looking down and writing a lot.  OK, I'll give the media that one.  What was he doing?  He was probably trying to figure out when Mitt would start with the zingers.  I can't blame him, I was too.

3) Mitt would cut Obamacare and PBS funding.  OK look, I know it's stupid to say you would cut PBS funding because it's such a small percentage of the budget, but I think he was just trying to make a joke.  Jim Lehrer was sitting right there.  If you've seen Mitt try to make jokes in the past, you know this is the best he's done so far.

So here's what I learned.  If you talk about Big Bird in a Presidential debate, people will talk about that shit.  They'll talk about that instead of, say, the job losses that cutting funding would create at local PBS stations that aren't funded by the Children's Television Workshop.

More importantly, I learned that if you win a Presidential debate by mostly being dishonest and misleading, the media will spend 99% of their reaction talking about the winning part and 1% of their reaction talking about the dishonest and misleading part (though I'm told MSNBC focused a little more on the lying, but that doesn't really count because they would have called Mitt a liar if his central argument was that the sky is blue...and no, I'm not saying MSNBC is the same as Fox, but they aren't neutral either).

The only important take-away is this.  If you're an undecided voter who plans to watch any of the remaining debates to decide who to vote for, just watch the debate and then turn it right off before those idiots on TV start telling you who you think won.  What happened to Keith Olbermann?  At least he was funny.