More on the debate.

Wow.  I don't know why the Obama team wanted Candy Crowley to stick to the format and strictly allowing the audience to ask the questions, but I can see why the Romney team wanted her to avoid asking follow-up questions of her own.  It didn't play well to Mitt's ability to stick to his 59 point plan and his talking points.

An aside: One thing worth noting carefully: Obama never bothered to attack Mitt's 12M new jobs proposition, based on Mitt's latest ads.  That was unfortunate, because WaPo and many others outlined why Mitt was lying in his ads.  Also as I noted previously, Moody's had already predicted that the economy was on its way towards creating 12M new jobs over the next four years.  Obama lost a huge opportunity to debunk Mitt's math on jobs, let alone the math of his tax cuts.

If you like Mitt, nothing changed; if you like Obama, you may have felt a strange tingling... that's called excitement and invigoration.  For some others, there was also a bit of testosterone flowing in there, particularly when the two men were standing toe to toe facing each other; for a few seconds, the scene resembled boxers weighing in, ready to rumble.

WTF, bro?

Yeah, I'm ready to rumble.

I'm the BMOC.

I'm taller than you.

And I'm about to beat you up.

Mitt challenged Barack on the issue of oil leases on public lands; Obama explained thoughtfully with "use it or lose it"; followed by Mitt essentially conceding the point and moving to the issue of oil production; Mitt alleged that oil production dropped; Obama said it was not true.

And you know what?  Mitt was more or less wrong on the points he was trying to make, with regards to US energy independence.  See follow up blog with the full series of charts.