Matt Taibbi on the Vice Presidential Debate:

The proper way to report such a tactic is to bring to your coverage exactly the feeling that Biden brought to the debate last night: contempt and amazement. We in the press should be offended by what Romney and Ryan are doing – we should take professional offense that any politician would try to whisk such a gigantic lie past us to our audiences, and we should take patriotic offense that anyone is trying to seize the White House using such transparently childish and dishonest tactics.

I actually felt bad for Paul Ryan in last night debate as if a little boy was getting his ass whipped by his parents. Joe Biden appeared to be teaching his son some maths. “It’s mathematically impossible,” he responded to Romney-Ryan’s five-trillion-dollar income-tax cut. When Martha Raddatz pressed Ryan for specifics of how he could pay for his tax cuts, Ryan couldn’t give one. Mad props to Ms. Raddatz for an outstanding job of moderating the debate.

Hendrik Hertzberg on “The Ungreat Debate“:

By the end of the ninety minutes, Romney had retrofitted himself as the defender of Medicare, the advocate of Wall Street regulation, the scourge of the big banks, the enemy of tax cuts for the rich, and the champion of tax relief for the middle class. All these claims are spectacularly false; all went entirely, or mostly, unrefuted.

Also read: “Mitt Romney-The 767 Lyin’ King“

Two days after the debate and I still am puzzling why Obama performed so bad. He was outstanding against John McCain four years ago even though he lacked the experience. With four years in the White House, I expected words just rolled off his tongue. He couldn’t have fumbled that bad against a flip flopper. Then it hit me. It has to be his strategic move to let his opponent have the first round. The next two debates, he’s going to make a comeback and to win both as well as the election.

I can’t wait to say, “I told you so.”

Paul Krugman:

What Mr. Romney did in the debate, in other words, was, at best, to play a word game with voters, pretending to offer something substantive for the uninsured while actually offering nothing. For all practical purposes, he simply lied about what his policy proposals would do.

When the tape leaked, he was completely behind his comment on the 47%. Now he is completely wrong. I am actually not surprised.

New York Times:

Virtually every time Mr. Romney spoke, he misrepresented the platform on which he and Paul Ryan are actually running. The most prominent example, taking up the first half-hour of the debate, was on taxes. Mr. Romney claimed, against considerable evidence, that he had no intention of cutting taxes on the rich or enacting a tax cut that would increase the deficit.

See also: At Last Night’s Debate: Romney Told 27 Myths In 38 Minutes

Obama was, as my son would say, “running out of puff.” Romney grilled him on the $90-billion green energy again and again, but he didn’t response, which made it sounded as if he was indeed fucked up. Was Obama too nice to bring up Romney’s tax, his association with Bain Capital on shipping jobs to China and his comment on the 47%? It was not a good night for Obama.

As for Romney, I thought I was watching De Niro playing politician. Unfortunately his emotion for the middle class was not as authentic as his disdain for the 47%. I reviewed last night debate as well as the 47% clip, I couldn’t believe the contrast between the two Romneys. On one clip, he cares for the middle class. On another clip, he doesn’t give a fuck about them. He backed away from his tax plan. He proposed cutting 20% of all marginal tax rates, which would cut $5 trillion in tax revenue. He suggested that he would cut fundings on programs like PBS to reduce reduce $1 trillion deficit.

Romney won the debate big time even with very little sincerity and substance.

Thomas Friedman on Romney’s Foreign Policy:

Mitt Romney, given his international business background, should understand this, but he acts instead as if he learned his foreign policy at the International House of Pancakes, where the menu and architecture rarely changes.

Andy Borowitz on Romney’s weaknesses:

With the first Presidential debate just two days away, G.O.P. nominee Mitt Romney has been working intensively on two skills that have eluded him throughout the campaign: talking and thinking.

In profiling Mitt Romney in the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann shows the positive side of Romney. He writes:

[Romney] combines an utter confidence in his ability to fix anything with an utter lack of confidence in his ability to explain to people what he intends to do, which is why he appears so stiff and so unspecific in talking about his prospective Presidency.

Unfortunately the article is not available for free online. Lemann shows that Romney seems to have the ability to get things done and to turn the economy around. Is it too late in the game?