(Source: onewritersheart)

Nate Silver: “This is the closest that we’ve come in a week or so to one candidate clearly having ‘won’ the day in the tracking polls — and it was Mr. Obama.”

maxistentialist:

ThinkProgress misattributed my “Cavalrymen for Romney” site to the Obama Campaign, and now there’s a lot of conspiracy theorists on Twitter including Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The Atlantic, who think the site suggests that Obama planned that line.

For the record, this site had nothing to do with the Obama campaign. I voluntarily linked it to the President’s website, because that’s a good resource for learning about his policies.

I definitely made the site quickly, but I didn’t have any advance knowledge of what would happen in the debate. When I heard Obama’s line about horses and bayonets, I thought about how funny those things would be as special interests (big horse), and that gave me the idea for the site. Once I had the idea, it only took me about ten minutes to launch it, and it was online well before the debate was over.

Here’s how I did it:

• I grabbed the first big Google Image search result for “cavalry” that was on a white background
• I copy/pasted the Romney logo onto his pike and mocked up the “learn more” button
• I exported my images and coded the site by hand in HTML and CSS… my TextExpander snippets let me assemble a site like that very, very quickly
• To eliminate domain name propagation time, I purchased the domain from my registrar (Gandi.net) and set it to redirect with a mask to a subdomain on my site

In case there was any confusion about where that Cavalrymen for Romney website came from, its creator offers an explanation.

TL;DR: No, it wasn’t the Obama campaign.

What amazes me is that watching some of the commentary after the debate, the fact that Romney just abandoned almost every position he has taken on foreign policy and agreed with the president’s moderate conservatism was taken as a smart move. Not a blatant, outrageous, cynical series of bald-faced lies.

Andrew Sullivan is mystified how Romney has completely flipped on his foreign policy positions.

A closer look at the Northeast, where Obama & Romney campaigns are battling it out for supremacy in the ground game. That smattering of blue and red dots towards the center of the map illustrates the campaign offices in Ohio. To the right, there’s Pennsylvania. South of that, North Carolina. But you already know that.

As of mid-October, the Obama campaign has 755 offices nationwide for its get-out-the-vote effort—nearly three times as many as the Romney campaign. Behold: the ground game!

To my mind, Obama dominated Romney tonight in every single way: in substance, manner, style, and personal appeal. He came back like a lethal, but restrained predator. He was able to defend his own record, think swiftly on his feet, and his Benghazi answer was superb. He behaved luke a president. He owned the presidency. And Romney? Well, he has no answers on the math question and was exposed. He was vulnerable on every social issue, especially immigration. And he had no real answer to the question of how he’d be different than George W Bush.

I’m excitable - but sometimes politics is about emotion as well as reason. And my view is that Obama halted Romney’s momentum in its tracks and his performance will bring women voters in particular flooding back. He’s just more persuasive. On watching with the sound off - apart from weird gaps in the CSPAN coverage - Obama did not grin like Biden; he smiled confidently, leaning forward. Within twenty minutes, Romney looked flush and a little schvitzy.

Game, set and match to Obama. He got it; he fought back; he gave us all more than ample reason to carry on the fight.

That’s Andrew Sullivan on tonight’s debate.

The recap, via Newsweek’s Andrew Romano.

Mitt Romney just got called out for lying about the Obama administration’s response to the Libya attack—and the audience applauded. Big time. Here’s David Frum’s tweet, he the former speechwriter for George W. Bush. Uh oh is right.

“This is your record,” Andrew Sullivan writes in a post titled A Tip For Obama For Tomorrow. “For fuck’s sake, stop running away from it.”