Don't Let's Panic

I can't decide who's more stupid:  the political elite and media who've overreacted to the first debate, or the "low information voters" who changed their minds based upon it.

The fact of the matter is that Obama didn't say anything particularly wrong or bad--nothing like what Mitt Romney has done several times in the campaign--he just didn't seem particularly into the event, or very interested in responding vigorously to Romney's (deceitful, flip-flopping) arguments that he debuted that night.

I can't believe the media is putting such a spotlight on tomorrow's Vice-Presidential debate.  Re-reading that sentence, I guess I do believe it, but I can't credit it very much.  I want to know who is going to change their vote because Paul Ryan made better points in a televised debate than Joe Biden (or vice versa, for that matter). It will be interesting to see what tack the two will take, though; will the Republicans try to continue with the faux moderate stance Romney adopted in the debate (can Ryan do that?)  Will Biden have all restraints removed and go into total attack mode? Then, I guess, tactically, both Presidential candidates can reconsider and reset their tactics for the next debate. (The last one will be on foreign policy, which will be the most important but probably anticlimactic.)

The worst overreaction came from Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Beast, who was positively freaking out about the Pew poll the other day that had Romney ahead by four points nationally.  Does he understand the meaning of the word "outlier"?

I don't want to call this "facts", because it's just an opinion based on data, but I would say that Obama is still an overwhelming favorite to win the election.  I think Obama should be able to learn from his errors in presentation evidenced the other day; what he needs to do in particular is demonstrate the passion for winning the election that we believe we deserve.  Why we think that, I don't know; based on what I've seen last week, we deserve the total black-hole tunnel of risk that electing Romney would represent.

OK, I guess we were a bit disappointed by his performance.  I would like to quote my blog post on the eve of the 2008 election, "We are going to be disappointed, that is for certain."  Give him a break--we all have a bad day!