The commander in chief was commanding throughout
The presidential debates are not a best-of-three series.
If they were, if the winner of the almost-ended campaign were selected by performance in the debates, President Barack Obama would have entered the series as the odds-on favorite. Any incumbent president would be in such a position, and Obama, always an eloquent speaker, was doubly so. But he slipped quickly to underdog after the initial match-up, during which challenger Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, clearly got the better of a sleepwalking Obama.
But the president clawed his way back into contention in Game 2, where he bested Romney. Finally, with Monday night’s gritty performance, the president won the rubber match.
But the presidential debates are not like a baseball playoff series.
They are instead a sort of precursor to the main event, Election Day, the ultimate contest. The voting on Nov. 6 is the only game that counts.
That said, in the third and final presidential debate, with the focus on foreign policy, the president was in charge from the first, with challenger Mitt Romney playing defense much of the time. Romney wasn’t bad, exactly, but he played from behind for the entire evening, never managing to mount a real threat.
The commander in chief was commanding throughout.
The question, of course, as it has been from the beginning, is how much the scoring of the debates will ultimately matter on Election Day. If the challenger needs to pass a minimum test in the debates – showing himself as up to the job he is seeking – then Romney did that, and then some, in the first and most important debate. How much his backsliding in the following two debates did to reverse that notion is, well, debatable.
With the election just 13 days away, the answer will soon enough become clear.