Second Debate

For the third debate in the row, I opted to watch baseball instead of the candidates. Watching the Yankees go down 3 games to 0 was far more enjoyable than watching two men bicker at each other.

Still, I caught some of the post debate reaction. The general thought seems to be that it was something close to a draw. CNN's instant poll had Mr. Obama winning 37-30 with the remaining thinking it was a draw, while a CBS poll thought that Mr. Romney dominated the questions on the economy.

The big talking point coming out of this debate seems to be the reaction on the Libya incident. Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama got after each other a bit and the moderator, Ms. Crowley, seems to have interjected herself in it to cut off the debate with an instant fact check. Watching the clip, I think this was a bit of a disservice to Mr. Obama. He seemed to be holding his own at that moment in the debate and would have scored easy points for simply deflecting Mr. Romney's accusations and making him look like a bully trying to turn American dead into a political football.

The appeal to Ms. Crowley and then her statement validating the President's argument had a bit of a "running to mom" feel to it. Regardless of whether or not the facts of the argument favored Mr. Romney or Mr. Obama (and that comes with an extreme parsing of the statement Mr. Obama made in the Rose Garden), the optics of that moment didn't help Mr. Obama and will probably keep the Libya topic in the news up until the next debate.

Overall, I doubt this debate will move the needle much in one direction or the other. Mr. Obama didn't hurt himself as he did in the first debate, but neither did it seem that he did anything that seriously blunted Mr. Romney's momentum. I'm sure that there will be many polls out soon, each saying that things are either swinging back towards Mr. Obama or swinging further to Mr. Romney (and possibly both).

Twenty days to go.