Charles Krauthammer: Romney romps by two touchdowns

Obama never even pulled out his best weapon, the 47 percent. Not once. That's called sitting on a lead, lazily and smugly. I wager he mentions it in the next debate, more than once — and likely in his kickoff.

On the other hand, Obama just isn't that good. Not without a teleprompter. He's not even that good at news conferences — a venue in which he's still in charge, choosing among questioners and controlling the timing of his own answers.

Romney looked presidential

By the end of the debate, Obama looked small, uncertain. It was Romney who had the presidential look.

Re-election campaigns after a failed presidential term — so failed that Obama barely even bothers to make the case, preferring to blame everything on his predecessor — hinge almost entirely on whether the challenger can meet the threshold of acceptability. Romney crossed the threshold Wednesday night.

Reagan won his election (Carter was actually ahead at the time) when he defused his caricature as some wild, extreme, warmongering cowboy. In his debate with Carter, he was affable, avuncular and reasonable. That's why with a single aw-shucks line, “There you go again,” the election was over.

Romney had to show something a little different: That he is not the clumsy, out-of-touch plutocrat that the paid Obama ads and the unpaid media have portrayed him to be. He did, decisively.

That's why MSNBC is on suicide watch. Why the polls show that, by a margin of at least two-to-one, voters overwhelmingly gave the debate to Romney. And he won big in an unusual way. This could be the only presidential debate ever won so definitively in the absence of some obvious and ruinous gaffe, like Gerald Ford's “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”

Romney by two touchdowns.