Time’s Mark Halperin has some details of a conference call Obama campaign maven David Axelrod had with reporters this morning. Some key points:
On the President’s failure to raise Romney’s 47% remarks: “He made a choice last night to answer the questions that were asked.”
On Romney’s performance: ”He may win the Oscar for his performance last night, but he’s not going to win the Presidency on his performance last night.”
On future debate strategy:
“It’s like a playoffs…. You evaluate after every contest and make adjustments and I’m sure we will make adjustments.”
“[The President] has to make some adjustments to the fact that [Romney] is kind of a serial artful dodger.”
We will “hold Gov. Romney accountable for the things he said in the first debate and make him justify those claims.”
Meanwhile, less than an hour ago on XM radio I heard Obama giving a stump speech today. It was an Obama almost unrecognizable from the seemingly burned out and listless Obama who last night confirmed what political scientists often say: an incumbent President’s first re-election debate is often lousy. The Huffington Post has a story on the return of the Obama who Democratic partisans had hoped would turn up at last night’s debate:
President Barack Obama is challenging Republican Mitt Romney’s candor the morning after their first debate, saying: “If you want to be president, you owe the American people the truth.”
Obama said at a rally in Denver on Thursday that at the debate he met “this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney.” But he says it couldn’t have been his Republican rival because he says Romney misrepresented his own position on taxes, education and the outsourcing of jobs.
In tough comments, the president says Romney, quote, “does not want to be held accountable … because he knows full well that we don’t want what he’s selling.”
The problem is: Obama didn’t seem to be making much of an effort to sell at all last night.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.