As I watched the first Presidential Debate last Wednesday, I almost couldn’t help but pity the president. By any — and effectively all — metrics, Gov. Romney wiped the floor with him.

The contrast was stark and completely obvious to anyone who didn’t have on their rose-colored Obama hope-and-change glasses. The president looked utterly disoriented, fatigued, timid and lazy. On numerous occasions, when given the opportunity to land potshots against Gov. Romney, he let the chance pass him by. When he feebly attempted to talk about policy, he offered a lackluster and mediocre defense of his own “accomplishments,” instead opting to lie and misrepresent Gov. Romney’s well thought out plans for revitalizing the United States. His best response following this empty chair performance? That evil one percenter Mitt Romney wants to get rid of Big Bird, the s.o.b!

In contrast, Gov. Romney came off as a polished and precise leader, perfectly capable of replacing the president and outperforming him. Keeping a laser focus on the economy and our ballooning national debt, he clearly and concisely laid out his pro-growth economic plan to revitalize the middle class and restore America’s economic prowess. Whenever the president attempted to lie about his economic agenda, Romney quickly and effectively responded with the most powerful rhetorical weapon of all: the truth.

When the president claimed domestic oil production is at its highest levels ever (infer, due to his policies), Romney correctly responded that all new oil resource development over the past four years has been on privately owned land, not land owned by the government. When the president repeatedly leveled the charge that his tax plan would cost the government $5 trillion over the next 10 years, Romney not only pointed out that the president’s plan to raise taxes on “millionaires and billionaires” (which, by the way, includes many people and small businesses that earn nowhere near a million dollars) would cost the economy 700,000 jobs, but also that his pro-growth tax plan would expand the size of the economy, get people working again and increase the amount of revenue to the government over the long term.

Don’t believe me? You don’t have to. The president’s own former press secretary, Robert Gibbs, called Gov. Romney’s performance “masterful.” Nearly all of the hosts on MSNBC — that sorry excuse of a leftist news network — lamented the president’s horrible performance and tried to pass off the pathetic excuse that the altitude in Denver was simply too much for the president to handle. According to Gallup, widely regarded as the most reliable polling outfit in the country, Governor Romney was found to have won the debate by 52 points — 72 percent to 20 percent — among those who watched the debate; that same poll found that a plurality of Obama supporters — 49 percent to 39 percent — believed that Romney had prevailed over their candidate.

Gov. Romney — trailing in the polls before the debate — needed a breakout performance, and that is precisely what he delivered. Republican voters are now more enthusiastic than their Democratic counterparts, independents show clear signs of breaking overwhelmingly in favor of the governor and Romney has returned to having a commanding lead on the question of who is the better candidate to fix the economy. With a strong performance by Congressman Ryan in the Vice Presidential Debate and only one more debate that will include domestic policy questions, this columnist is more hopeful than ever that we will have a new president-elect in 28 days time.

Jeffrey Robin hasn’t taken off his lucky American flag underoos since Wednesday’s debate… and doesn’t plan to until after Election Day.

To read the “Left Said” article from this week’s topic, click here.

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