Anatomy Of An Ass Kicking.

First things first, I usually only release these guys for electoral victories, but what the hey. Last night's Romney victory was so overwhelming, (and Obama's performance was likewise so underwhelming,) that I believe it is fitting to let fly the Baby Elephants.

I have two clips here for comparison on the analysis of last night's events. The first is from Michelle Malkin, who managed to catch some of the things that I missed in my euphoria last night. Suffice it to say that Willard Romney exceeded even the lofty expectations that came with Chris Christie's confident tossing of the proverbial gauntlet. What Mitt Romney did specifically was to take every single ridiculous canard ever uttered as a lefty talking point over the past three decades and use fact, reason, and plain English to use that canard as a weapon with which to bitch slap President Zero. Had John McCain showed half this amount of fight four years ago, he would be President today, defending himself against Hillary Clinton. How bad was the beat down? At one point during the evening's festivities, Little Barry pleaded with Jim Lehrer to change topics, the debate equivalent to declaring a TKO.

And now for something completely different, and by different I mean watching Chrissy Mathews come completely unglued in his, "objectivity," while describing his take on how the debate went. (I guess he didn't have that thrill going up his leg last night.) I will at this point in time point out that Jim Lehrer gave me an unexpected pleasant surprise with how he handled his moderating duties last night. The debate was not at all about Lehrer being the star, or about how slantingly he could phrase his questions. He merely stated a topic, gave it a gentle nudge to get the juices flowing, and then removed himself from the conversation. That was the first time in my memory watching the two candidates primarily having a substantive discussion on values, beliefs, philosophies, agendas, and policy positions in which they were able to speak to the issues and differences in any sort of a meaningful way. It was truly an argument in the arena of ideas. So how did Chrissy see it all?

When I was in High School, much longer ago than I certainly like to admit, my girlfriend was on the school's debate team. I went to one of her events, and two things immediately struck me. One, She was really quite a lot smarter than I was, and two, the rules of the debate seemed rather odd. Each team was given a week to prepare for the upcoming debate, but rather than assign differing sides to an issue, each team was allowed to choose which side they would take. They had to prepare rebuttals to both sides, not knowing which side the other team would take. I found it amusing that every team at almost every debate chose the same side to argue.

There are many people on the left and right who felt Barack Obama came in woefully under prepared for last night's debate. While that may be true, it is also true that Barack Obama is in the position of having to defend the worst Administration in America's 236 year history. He has no such choice as to which position of this debate he would like to argue. When you take away the smoke and mirrors, the spin, the lap dog media, and his stellar ability to read a speech from a teleprompter, this election, and mostly these debates will be about whether we should award another four years of America's future to Barack Obama.

In his first statement, Barack Obama told us that this election should not be about the past, but about the future. Them's not exactly fighting words, them's hiding words. In a nut shell, President Obama is walking a tightrope here. On the one hand he's happy to have the natural advantage of incumbency on his side in the upcoming election, and on the other hand, he would rather voters really not think too long or hard as to what kind of a job he's done during the previous four years. There's already been a lot of hand wringing on the left about why oh why Barack Obama did not bring up this point or that point, mostly pieces of the aforementioned ridiculousness concerning the supposed 47% gaffe, Bain Capital, war on women, etc. There is a reason for that. President Obama started trotting out the talking points early and often in the first ten minutes of the evening. He got what he thought were his best kill shots fired back at him in a manner that left visible marks on his person and psyche. After 20 minutes of that, five of his best punches having left its indelible mark on his squarely paddled backside, the rest of the evening became about Barack Obama's attempt to run out the clock and put an end to the misery of the left. Barack Obama's speech became noticeably slow, pretty much the same cadence one might find in the local police department drunk tank. He spoke long and slowly, and avoided anything even resembling a point, lest it be rolled up in stone and fired back at him as another candidacy ending salvo.

Mitt Romney on the other hand had another challenge. The Obama campaign has spent Hundreds of Millions of dollars in an effort to portray Mitt Romney as evil to his core, a man we should expect to see entering the debate sporting horns on his head and with a barbed tail protruding from under his suit coat. The only thing Romney needed to do in order to win was to walk out on stage without a red pitch fork and not eat a baby in some sort of ritualistic sacrifice. As no babies died in Denver last night, and Mitt Romney did not have any props which could be mistaken for a red pitchfork, everything else that happened was gravy. There was oh so much gravy. My personal favorite moment of the night was early on when Barack brought up my pet peeve of Democrat canards, those supposed oil subsidies, which as a matter of fact are nothing more than straight line expense deductions any business takes while preparing their income tax returns. (The oil industry happens to be the second most heavily taxed industry in our nation, with Tobacco being number one.) Mitt politely pointed out that in one year, Green Subsidies are 50 times greater than even the fictitious Oil Subsidies, and for a far smaller benefit I might add.

In the end it was nothing more than one small night which signaled that the race is not over yet. Mitt Romney is still in this race, and is probably ahead if looked at honestly. Special note to the Romney team, Barack Obama is not going to take this lying down. In the game of, "is the Republican Stupid, Senile, of Evil," there is only one choice that fits Mitt Romney. Expect the attacks to be stepped up immediately, and expect the next debate performance made by our President to look different. The good news is that the next one of these will be on foreign policy, just at a time when Obama's endeavors in that area have 25% of America's embassies set ablaze. It should be fun.

Cross Posted from Musings of a Mad Conservative.