The Romny-ator Returns.

The Town Hall format of tonight's Presidential debate meant that it was always going to be a socially awkward affair with all the questions being asked by members of the public with no experience appearing in front of a worldwide television audience of hundreds of millions. To make matters worse the convention seems to be that in answering the candidate will stand right in front of the clearly terrified questioner and look them dead in the eye while completely ignoring the question in favour of trying to lever in some pre-prepared point. For example in response to a question about gun control Romney used his two allotted minutes to talk about how he improved Massachusetts schools during his time as Governor. As a result the whole debate had an air of the candidates trying to scare the public into submission.

Romney was clearly much more frightened by this format and decided to respond through intimidation. This began right at the start of the debate when he remained standing long after Obama had sat down in a clear effort to make Obama feel paranoid about whether he'd sat down to early. A move that I thought was reminiscent of Al Gore's rather odd behaviour in the 2000 debate. Romney went on to use lots of circular sentences that don't really go anywhere and often contradict themselves and talked about things either getting lower or higher while illustrating the point with the movement of his outstretched hand, palm up. This are all sort hypnotic techniques used to manipulate the person you're talking too's behaviour. In this case Romney was mainly trying to make Obama look flustered by getting him to stand up or sit down on command. Unfortunately the way he was trying to employ these techniques was so obvious, robotic and downright clunky that Obama, the moderator and members of the audience who were familiar with this sort of thing started to very gently mock Romney's behaviour causing the colour to drain from his cheeks and at one point leading me to think he was going to have some sort of nervous breakdown. Fortunately for Romney though with the help of a clearly partisan audience member who at one point referred to his as "President" he was just about able to hold it together and slip in a few of his pre-prepared zingers. The only problem was that Obama's pre-prepared zingers were clearly much better. One particular highlight was in response to the question about gas (petrol) prices when Obama said something along the lines of; "I know that gas is around $4 a gallon today but was only $1.85 when I took office. That's because when I took office our economy was in the worst recession in living memory. So I'm sure that Romney will be able to bring gas back down to $1.85 a gallon because he'll drag our economy back into recession."

I think to the credit of all involved the debate largely steered clear of foreign policy but it would have been impossible for the death of US Ambassador Chris Stevens in Libya not to come up. Obama responded to this perfectly by very Presidentialy and assertively pointing out that because ultimately these decisions are his responsibility and because he has to meet the coffins as they return home he does not play politics with issues of that importance. With the last couple of weeks of the Republican campaign having being built around playing politics with the issue Romney had little choice other then to continue and repeatedly pressed to know why it had taken the administration more then two weeks to call the incident a terrorism. Obama simply pointed out that he'd stood in the White House rose garden two days after the attack and called it terrorist - a point that even Fox News have conceeded; http://foxnewsinsider.com/2012/09/12/transcript-read-president-obamas-remarks-on-american-deaths-in-libya-attack/

03:35 on 17/10/12.