They just don’t come bigger than this. Obama says he had an off night during the first debate and that if you read the transcript instead of looking at the body language he took Romney apart. But those who watched, and the analyses that came later, were almost unanimous in seeing a decisive win for Mitt Romney. Romney was in command. He totally outshone and overshadowed a tongue tied and incoherent President, supposedly our modern Demosthenes, Pericles and Cicero all in one. Or at least that was the general perception until he was forced, for almost the first time since he began his run for president, to defend his policies in public, under challenge and without a teleprompter. Obama’s dismal showing has led to a surge in support for Romney and unless Obama can pull it back in this debate, the odds that he is about to lose the election will become very short indeed. But once again I point out the one advantage Obama has which is the phenomenal data mining operation he has put in place. Once more I raise that passage from Peggy Noonan written well over a year ago:

The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The ‘Analytics Department’ is looking for ‘predictive Modeling/Data Mining’ specialists to join the campaign’s ‘multi-disciplinary team of statisticians,’ which will use ‘predictive modeling’ to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. ‘We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions.’

There are the things that must be done to fix the American economy and to restore some kind of order in America’s foreign relations. That is Romney’s speciality. There are also the things that can be said that will gather votes but if implemented would bring further ruin to the United States and to us along with them. That is Obama’s speciality. If the result of the American election interests you, it may all come down to this hour and a half. It will be Mitt Romney’s sound policy and good sense against Obama’s disastrous policy record and far left agenda.

The viewing details here in Australia:

Wednesday October 17: Presidential debate #2: Foreign and domestic policy

Watch the debate live on SBS ONE or streamed live on the SBS World News Australia website from 12pm ADST.