Share On more Share On more 
 
 Mitt Romney, trailing in the polls, needed to prove tonight that he could stand on stage with President Barack Obama as an equal and a plausible president of the United States. 
 
 He did that in the crucial first 40 minutes of Wednesday night's debate, addressing Obama respectfully, even warmly — but then tangling with a sometimes hazy and professorial Obama on taxes and deficits. 
 
 "You don't just pick the winners and losers — you pick the losers," he told Obama of his energy investments, sliding time and time again into a second person singular address calculated to level the rhetorical playing field. 
 
 Romney departed dramatically from the hard conservatism of his primary campaign, downplaying the scope of his tax cuts. 
 
 “There will be no tax cut that adds to the deficit," he said, without fully explaining how he'd accomplish that. 
 
 And he sought to soften the edge of his cuts with an easy example of the cuts he'd make. 
 
 "I'm sorry Jim, but I'm going to stop this subsidy to PBS. I like Big Bird, I like you, too," he said. 
 
 And he embraced — to a point — the Simpson-Bowles plan for cutting the deficit, while stopping short of actually crossing the line to support a tax increase. 
 
 But Romney's core success was that he won by not losing: He has barely weathered a campaign that reduced him to a smaller figure than President Obama. On stage, they were roughly the same size. ||||| Obama often sounded like he was defending a doctoral dissertation, Simon writes. | REUTERS Obama snoozes and loses 
 
 DENVER — One word of advice for Barack Obama before his next debate: caffeine. 
 
 I had a Pepsi right before the debate started Wednesday night and was tingly for the next 90 minutes. 
 
 Story Continued Below 
 
 President Obama looked like someone had slipped him an Ambien. 
 
 ( Also on POLITICO: 5 takeaways from the Denver debate) 
 
 The first presidential debate of 2012 took place at the University of Denver and was between Obama and Mitt Romney. But only Romney showed up. 
 
 For much of the debate, it appeared as if Obama, the former professor, and not Obama, the presidential candidate, was on stage. 
 
 It’s not that Romney’s performance was perfect or polished — it wasn’t — it’s just that Obama’s was so mediocre. 
 
 It is possible Obama was overconfident, but I doubt it. He is not a foolish man. So I think he was just overtired or over-distracted or over-something. But he sure wasn’t over-energetic. 
 
 ( PHOTOS: Obama not having fun) 
 
 Maybe Jen Psaki, his traveling press secretary, was preparing us when she said on Air Force One Sunday that Obama “has had less time to prepare than we anticipated. That’s just a fact. It’s difficult to schedule significant blocks of time when you’re the president.” 
 
 Mitt Romney, by comparison, seemed bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. He seemed to enjoy being there. 
 
 He was far from profound. “My priority is putting people back to work in this country,” he said. 
 
 And: “I love great schools.” 
 
 Trite? You bet. But at least he spoke in reasonably short sentences. 
 
 Obama often sounded like he was defending a doctoral dissertation. His thoughts seemed to range from lengthy to endless. 
 
 Mr. President, shorter is better. Really. We are a society with a short attention span. 
 
 ( Also on POLITICO: Not debatable: Obama stumbled) 
 
 Complex problems do not require complex answers. Not on TV, they don’t. Once a candidate is safely elected, he can be as long-winded as he wants in the White House and even before Congress. 
 
 But he has to get elected. And it’s a little early for Obama to fall on the ball. Which is where he seemed to spend most of the evening Wednesday. 
 
 And, by so doing, he let Romney get away with a lot. 
 
 “Mr. President, you’re entitled to your own airplane and your own house, but not to your own facts,” Romney said in one of the few zingers of the debate. 
 
 Couldn’t Obama have replied in kind? Obama could have said something like: “And you, Gov. Romney, think you’re entitled to car elevators and Swiss bank accounts!” ||||| You can think of a general election campaign as being divided into four quarters. 
 
 The first one consists of the presidential primaries. What matters in this stage is not only who gets nominated, but how well they position themselves for the remainder of the race, through things like fund-raising, adopting (or avoiding) issue positions that might be damaging later, gaining experience on the campaign trail, building out their staffs and receiving at least an initial round of vetting by the news media. 
 
 The second quarter begins when the candidates effectively clinch their nominations, and the general election campaign begins in earnest. This period is long and sluggish, and most of the “fans” (voters) will not really have tuned in yet. But it is also a time when a campaign makes important strategic decisions, in terms of its tone and tenor, its allocation of resources, and its issue positioning — decisions that it may be stuck with, for better or for worse. The second quarter culminates when the candidates make their vice-presidential selections. 
 
 The third quarter consists of the party conventions and their immediate aftermath. It is a short quarter as far as the calendar goes, but one in which the winner of the election often becomes much more apparent. George H.W. Bush in 1988, Bill Clinton in 1992, and George W. Bush in 2004 moved into leads after the conventions that they essentially never relinquished. 
 
 We’ve probably already been in the fourth quarter for a week or so, because we’ve already passed the point when a convention bounce (if it was indeed a bounce and not a permanent shift in the conditions) might be expected to wear off. And we’ll reach a fourth-quarter landmark on Wednesday, when President Obama and Mitt Romney hold their first of three debates. 
 
 
 
 Every now and then, the game goes into overtime — in which case things like turnout and the Electoral College math suddenly begin to matter a great deal. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: it’s early in the fourth quarter and Mitt Romney finds himself down in the race. The question is how far behind he is, and what he’ll have to do to make up his deficit with Mr. Obama. 
 
 According to the win probability calculator at AdvancedNFLStats.com, an N.F.L. team down by field goal with 10 minutes left to play in the fourth quarter has a 34 percent probability of winning the game. A team down by a touchdown wins just 16 percent of the time. 
 
 (A technical note for sports geeks: these cases assume that the trailing team has possession of the football with first down and 10 yards to go at its own 20 yard line.) 
 
 If you look at our estimate of Mitt Romney’s chances of winning the Electoral College, which are about 15 percent right now in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, the touchdown analogy works best: Mr. Romney has about as much chance of winning as an N.F.L. team does when it trails by a touchdown early in the fourth quarter. 
 
 It might be surprising that a team down by just a touchdown — a close game, by any common description of it — winds up winning so rarely. But there are a few things to consider. 
 
 First, a field goal alone won’t be enough for the team to come back. It needs something big to happen — or it needs to score at least twice. 
 
 Second, although there’s still enough time in the game for the trailing team to have multiple opportunities to score, there is also enough time for the opponents to score as well and extend their lead. So the team still has to play defense — it’s not purely a two-minute drill. 
 
 A third and often overlooked (if completely obvious) point: if the trailing team does score a clutch touchdown, it only ties the game. There are a lot of cases in which it will later lose anyway. 
 
 Right now, our forecast says that Mr. Romney has only about a 15 percent chance of winning. But that does not mean that he only has a 15 percent chance of tightening the race — or of making it come down to the wire. 
 
 But there are plenty of circumstances in which Mr. Romney has some good things happen, makes the race very close, and then loses — whether because he loses Ohio, or because his turnout operation isn’t much good, or because the polls turn out to be slightly biased toward him rather than against him. 
 
 As for what might happen this week: the first debate alone will probably not provide an opportunity for Mr. Romney to score a touchdown. Historically, the largest shifts in the polls after the first debate have been about three points in either direction — smaller than Mr. Romney’s current deficit in most polls. This would be the equivalent of a field goal. 
 
 But there is also another potential scoring opportunity for Mr. Romney: the monthly jobs report, the next-to-last one before the election, will come out on Friday. 
 
 My view is that we’ve gotten to the point where the importance of these jobs reports can be a little overstated. That’s not because the economy isn’t important (of course it is), or because jobs aren’t an important economic indicator (of course they are), but because any one economic report won’t tell you all that much. Furthermore, both the forecasts of jobs numbers and the government’s initial estimates of it are quite crude. Payrolls are expected to have grown by about 115,000 jobs in this month’s report, but those forecasts miss, on average, by about 70,000 jobs. 
 
 Still, there is about a one-in-five chance (based on the historical distribution of forecast errors) that the jobs estimate will miss by at least that margin to the downside, which means that fewer than 50,000 jobs will have been created last month. If we print a jobs number somewhere in that range — say, just 35,000 jobs added last month — perhaps that counts as another field goal for Mr. Romney. 
 
 Here’s where the precision of our analogy breaks down. Unlike in a football game, we do not know exactly how far Mr. Romney is behind. Could a clear win for Mr. Romney in the debate — and a distinctively bad (but not subzero) jobs report — be enough to draw the race into a tie? One of those things alone probably won’t do it. But if he gets both? It seems possible, at least, but it’s hard to know for sure. 
 
 Also unlike in a football game, of course, the candidates don’t necessarily take turns. We’ve just described Mr. Romney’s dream scenario, an imaginable (if not exceptionally likely) sequence of events that could have the race looking almost even by a week or two from now. But it could be Mr. Obama who scores next instead. If he is perceived as winning the debate, and the jobs number misses by a substantial margin to the upside (meaning that more than about 180,000 jobs are created), Mr. Romney’s position could become extremely desperate. 
 
 Sunday’s Polls 
 
 There were some interesting polls on Sunday, but not necessarily ones that ought to much alter our understanding of the race. 
 
 The most noteworthy number was a national poll from The Washington Post and ABC News. Their top-line number was good for Mr. Romney, putting him just two points behind among likely voters — closer than most other recent surveys. 
 
 In context, however, the poll was not quite as encouraging as it seemed for Mr. Romney. One issue is that the trendline did not improve for him. The Washington Post and ABC News national polls have generally shown fairly strong numbers for Mr. Romney; they had him behind by just one point among likely voters in a poll they conducted just after the Democratic convention, and ahead by two points in their poll before either party convention. 
 
 Another issue is that the story that the Washington Post and ABC News polls are telling about the election is one in which Mr. Romney has Electoral College problems. Although their national polls have shown a very tight race throughout the year, their recent surveys of Florida, Ohio and Virginia had Mr. Obama with big leads there. For that matter, a breakout from their latest national poll showed Mr. Obama with a much clearer lead in swing states than in the country as a whole. I don’t think you should make very much of that — I’d much rather look at actual polls of the swing states than a small-sample breakout that lumps them all together — but since the Washington Post and ABC News polls have shown quite poor numbers for Mr. Romney in the battleground states that they surveyed, at least we’re getting a consistent story from them. 
 
 There were also two Ohio polls on Wednesday. One, from Public Policy Polling, put Mr. Romney down by four points there. If The Washington Post’s national poll was not quite as strong as it looked for Mr. Romney, this one was a little better for him than it might appear, since Public Policy Polling’s surveys are slightly Democratic-leaning and since their other two polls of Ohio since the conventions had shown Mr. Obama with slightly larger leads. 
 
 However, this was counterbalanced by a Columbus Dispatch poll, which put Mr. Obama ahead by nine points in Ohio. The Columbus Dispatch poll is highly unusual — it is conducted entirely by mail — a technique that has produced some big hits and big misses in the past. But the trendline is worth looking at even if the topline numbers should be taken with some caution, and it was very favorable for Mr. Obama since their August poll had shown a tied race. 
 
 My impressionistic view is that Mr. Obama’s polls have not been quite as strong over the past three or four days as they were early last week, but the FiveThirtyEight forecast does not yet record any signs of a turnaround. Mr. Obama’s position held steady in the “now-cast,” our estimate of what would happen in an election held today. And he gained slightly in the Nov. 6 forecast, as he is likely to do on most days in which the polling is neutral or ambiguous, since time is running off Mr. Romney’s clock. 
 
 But time in a presidential campaign is not linear. By this point next week, two of Mr. Romney’s best remaining opportunities to change the game will have come and gone. ||||| You only needed to look at the faces of MSNBC’s pundits or Democratic officials in the spin room to know what everyone professionally involved in politics believes — Mitt Romney won big in this first debate. We’ll see how the public digests it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the polls draw close in the next week and that thereafter this race — as was always likely — goes down to the wire. 
 
 I’ll let others assess in detail Romney’s assertive presence and demeanor, and the obvious toll it took on the president, who, in split screen shots when he wasn’t speaking, often looked irked or working a bit to suppress frustration or anger. 
 
 What interests me most is Mitt’s audacity. Wednesday night at long last came the full-throated return of the Rockefeller Republican many suspect is Romney’s true political nature, if indeed he has one. With one fatal exception I’ll note in a moment, on taxes, health care, education, regulation and more, Romney came across as deeply informed, experienced and reasonable, and as a powerful and articulate critic of the economy’s weaknesses on Obama’s watch. 
 
 Romney’s macro theory of the race has always been that in a time of high unemployment and economic anxiety, being a credible alternative would suffice. Until tonight, the polls suggested that strategy was falling short. Now, it looks much more plausible, especially when combined with the iron political law that every presidential campaign eventually obeys: Do what you have to do to get the nomination, and then appeal to the center once its locked up. I expected Mitt to turn to the middle right after he became the de facto nominee, or at least at the convention, and not wait until now. If he wins, of course, Romney and his advisers will be hailed as geniuses for their timing, for bonding the party faithful to the ticket with the choice of Paul Ryan and a conservative-themed convention, and then dashing to the center for the home stretch. 
 
 Look at what we saw Wednesday night. Mitt Romney believes that of course we need regulation to make markets work, and that banks need higher capital standards to protect taxpayers from having to bail out their bad bets — yet he also laid out some convincing ideas about Dodd-Frank’s unintended consequences and shortcomings. He’d mend banking regulation, not end it. His air of reasonableness made Obama’s retort that Romney wanted to let Wall Street run wild feel off key. This tone and positioning was emblematic of Romney’s performance across a number of issues. 
 
 Health care has always required enormous audacity from Romney. While his attempt to distinguish his Massachusetts plan from Obamacare wasn’t persuasive to someone like me, who has studied the details for years, I think it would have appeared perfectly reasonable to less wonky voters. I won’t rehearse them all here, but Romney previewed his staccato talking points on this matter in the Republican primary debates, and I wrote then that (to my astonishment) he was on his way to a politically sufficient position. That Romney can not only pull this off but also go on offense while doing it (when in fact Romneycare is basically the same as Obamacare) takes remarkable dexterity. 
 
 Which brings us to Mitt’s audacity on taxes: What can Obama reply when Romney says, as he now does, that he’ll insist that his reforms end up both revenue and distributionally neutral, so that we’re simply getting the supposed growth benefit from lower marginal rates, especially for small business? The president can call him a flip flopper or mathematically challenged, or assert that it can’t work without taking on sacred cows like the mortgage interest deduction and the tax exemption for employer-provided health benefits, but so long as Romney has Marty Feldstein and other respected economists saying it’s theoretically possible, as a political matter, it’s likely a draw. (The truth is that Romney originally proposed cutting taxes only for middle income earners who would “suffered most in the Obama economy,” before he decided in the primaries to sign on to bolder conservative tax theology to win, so this may in fact be a return to an emphasis Romney actually “believes in” – to the extent that this is an intelligible concept.) 
 
 Romney’s critics — including me — are often frustrated that he’s been laughably inconsistent on policy over time. But, as I’ve argued before, from his point of view this criticism really doesn’t matter. Romney’s not trying to win a prize from pundits for coherence or consistency. He’s trying to win the power of the presidency. Actual consistency — as opposed to the appearance of having certain guiding principles — has surprisingly little relevance when it comes to getting to 50 percent plus one. Just ask Ronald Reagan, who pragmatically raised taxes multiple times as both governor and president while winning elections and retaining his reputation as an anti-tax crusader. 
 
 Yet taxes were the most striking of the president’s many failures Wednesday to draw contrasts that would have rightly made Romney look unattractive. Amazingly, Obama failed to dramatize the injustice of Romney’s desire to exempt wealthy individuals like himself from any participation in the inevitable fiscal adjustment the country faces. He made the point feebly that Romney wouldn’t go for even a 10 to 1 spending cut to tax hike deal, and tossed out a weird line about Donald Trump, but he didn’t hammer home the insanity and immorality of constantly cutting taxes on high earners when we’ve been at war for a decade and now need to pay for the boomers’ costly retirement. 
 
 Indeed, if I were advising Romney, I’d say that atop tonight’s performance, if Romney said he’d be open to top earners bearing a greater tax burden as part of broader changes that get our long term fiscal house in order, he’d knock out the single most indefensible policy choice that lets Democrats brand him justly as nefarious. He must have reasons for not doing this, but with Romney, who knows what’s coming? Maybe in the next debate he’ll say he’s thought it over and that people like him may need to pay something more, and he’ll score big with independent voters. 
 
 Obama’s other striking omission was his failure to slam the Republican Congress for its failure to cooperate on what was essentially a Republican-style health reform. Again, the president hit the point once, but feebly. He left Romney looking like a leader who could pass a major health reform on a bipartisan basis, and Obama as lacking the chops to do the same in Washington. That’s unfair to Obama — as in the first years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Republicans were determined in 2009 and 2010 to do everything in their power to foil major health reform or to gain politically if it passed. But Obama failed completely to articulate this reality for the viewing audience. 
 
 It’s hard to know what the president or his team were thinking Wednesday night. Maybe those who said it is a rattling experience for any president used to sycophants to be confronted in public by a forceful critic were right: This throws a man off his game. Maybe the campaign figured its ads could do the dirty work while Obama took the high road while on stage. But whatever Team Obama thought before Wednesday night, it’s about to change. Because based on the first debate, it’s a recipe for defeat. 
 
 Matt Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and a contributor to MSNBC. His e-mail address is mattino2@gmail.com. ||||| Instant-reaction polls conducted by CNN and CBS News suggest that Mitt Romney was the winner of the first presidential debate. 
 
 A CNN poll of debate-watchers found Mr. Romney very clearly ahead, with 67 percent of registered voters saying he won the debate, against just 25 percent for President Obama. 
 
 A CBS News poll of undecided voters who watched the debate found 46 percent siding with Mr. Romney, 22 percent for Mr. Obama and 32 percent saying it was a tie. 
 
 Google, which is experimenting with online surveys, found 38.9 percent of respondents saying they thought Mr. Obama performed better in a poll it conducted during the debate, against 35.5 percent for Mr. Romney and 25.6 percent who said it was a draw. But a second poll they conducted after the debate found 47.8 percent of respondents giving Mr. Romney the advantage, against 25.4 percent for Mr. Obama. 
 
 There is not a lot of empirical research on the relationship between instant reaction polls and their eventual effect on the head-to-head polls. However, these were strong numbers for Mr. Romney where comparisons to past post-debate polls are available. A similar CBS News poll conducted among undecided voters after the first debate in 2008, for example, found that 40 percent said that Mr. Obama won the debate, against 22 percent for John McCain. The head-to-head polls moved toward Mr. Obama by about three percentage points after that debate, although some of that may have been from the momentum that Mr. Obama had carrying into the evening. 
 
 The 67 percent of voters in the CNN poll who said that Mr. Romney won Wednesday night’s debate was higher than in any of the network’s surveys of the 2008 debates. 
 
 By comparison, 51 percent of debate-watchers in a CNN poll after the first presidential debate in 2008 said that Mr. Obama had the stronger performance. And 58 percent said so after the third and final presidential debate in 2008. 
 
 There may be some mitigating factors for Mr. Obama. First, although the conventional wisdom was that Mr. Obama had a lackluster performance throughout most of the debate — he certainly had an extremely cautious and defensive strategy — there were few obvious moments in which he said things that will make for compelling YouTube clips or cable news soundbites. 
 
 Second, head-to-head polls throughout the election cycle have been hard to influence for any reason. There are few undecided voters remaining — and undecided voters may be less likely than others to have actually watched the debates. 
 
 Still, it seems likely that Mr. Romney will make at least some gains in head-to-head polls after the debate, and entirely plausible that they will be toward the high end of the historical range, in which polls moved by about three percentage points toward the candidate who was thought to have the stronger debate. 
 
 The FiveThirtyEight “now-cast” — our estimate of what would happen in an election held immediately — had Mr. Romney trailing by a wider margin than three points in advance of the debate. (Instead, it put his deficit at about five points nationwide.) But our Nov. 6 forecast anticipated that the race would tighten some. It’s going to take a few days for any reaction to the debate to filter through the FiveThirtyEight model. 
 
 My own instant reaction is that Mr. Romney may have done the equivalent of kicking a field goal, perhaps not bringing the race to a draw, but setting himself up in such a way that his comeback chances have improved by a material amount. The news cycle will be busy between now and Nov. 6, with a jobs report coming out on Friday, a vice-presidential debate next week and then two more presidential debates on Oct. 16 and Oct. 22. 
 
 According to one prominent offshore gambling site, Pinnacle Sports, Mr. Obama’s odds of winning the election declined to about 73 percent after the debate from around 80 percent beforehand.
– Everyone from the left to the right thinks Mitt Romney smoked President Obama in last night's debate, but how will that translate to the polls? Nate Silver of the New York Times says it's possible he could see a gain of about 3 points, about as high as these things get. He likens it to Romney kicking a field goal, which makes more sense when you recall that Silver had Romney down by a touchdown before the debate. Romney hasn't tied the game, but he's set "himself up in such a way that his comeback chances have improved by a material amount." A sampling of other opinions today: Roger Simon, Politico: "It’s not that Romney’s performance was perfect or polished—it wasn’t—it’s just that Obama’s was so mediocre. ... I think he was just overtired or over-distracted or over-something. But he sure wasn’t over-energetic." Ben Smith, BuzzFeed: Romney's biggest task was to prove "he could stand on stage with President Barack Obama as an equal and a plausible president of the United States." Check. Matt Miller, Washington Post: Well played, Romney. Miller expected him to track to the middle more quickly after the primaries, but maybe this is better. "If he wins, of course, Romney and his advisers will be hailed as geniuses for their timing, for bonding the party faithful to the ticket with the choice of Paul Ryan and a conservative-themed convention, and then dashing to the center for the home stretch."