The first debate: Why Romney won—what’s next

When it was all over, I was stunned. If it were a t-ball game instead of a Presidential Debate, Jim Lehrer would have stopped it early, invoking the slaughter rule. Not only did Romney win the first debate between the presidential contenders, but he won big. The strangest part was not only did he win on content, but on style. Mitt Romney looked like a man passionate about changing the country.

President Obama looked petulant, repeating the same false taking points over and over whether they were relevant to the point being made, or not. The President looked thin-skinned, like a man not used to having his policies questioned.

The challenger’s task was to show he had a grasp of the issues, reasonable solutions, and most important was that he had to show he wasn’t the evil villain, the hater of puppies and little babies portrayed in the Obama campaign advertising. Romney passed with flying colors.

From the very beginning, the President was trying to avoid talking about his record, while Romney tried to make him wear it like Hester’s “A” in The Scarlet Letter.

“You’ve been president four years. You said you’d cut the deficit in half. It’s now four years later. We still have trillion-dollar deficits. The CBO says we’ll have a trillion-dollar deficit each of the next four years. If you’re re-elected, we’ll get to a trillion-dollar debt.”

When Obama tried to invoke George Bush with a “failed policies of the past” comment, Romney countered with:

”Let’s look at history. My plan is not like anything that’s been tried before. My plan is to bring down rates, but also bring down deductions and exemptions and credits at the same time so the revenue stays in, but that we bring down rates to get more people working.

He explained firmly that his tax plan was a restructuring of the Tax Code, not a cut to revenues or for the rich (and diplomatically pointing out that Obama was lying).

“First of all, I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale that you’re talking about. “