“Look,” the person said, “That’s what he does when he’s really into it.” … Elmo, too?” But it wasn’t the joke that struck a top Obama adviser watching from stage right, it was the way the boss was gripping the lectern - left hand grabbing the front, right hand in his pocket. “We didn’t know that Big Bird was driving the federal deficit. “Thank God somebody is finally getting tough on Big Bird,” he said. The first public sign of that new narrative - and Obama’s whipsaw transformation from drip to draw - was his appearance before a 12,000-person crowd at a park in Denver Thursday morning, when he rolled out his new, tougher attack on Romney: the Sesame Street assault. “I said it over the weekend - people are itching to write the Romney comeback story, so it was already leaning in that direction,” Plouffe said.įor his part, Obama waited about 12 hours to start spinning his own post-debate comeback tale. Plouffe said Obama planned to make “adjustments” at the second of three presidential debates but dismissed the notion that his boss had gone “soft” by holding too few press conferences and sitting down for too many powder-puff interviews on “The View” and elsewhere. “Sure, there might have been an exchange where that came up,” he said of the video. On Thursday, Plouffe told reporters on Air Force One that the omissions weren’t deliberate. They also figured on him smiling a whole lot more, a key part of winning the body-language battle.Īnd, to the puzzlement of Democrats, he didn’t mention two of the most effective attack lines - Bain Capital and Romney’s “47 percent” video. Obama had always planned to play it pretty safe, but his advisers expected him to be more aggressive, peppering Romney with requests for specifics on his deficit and tax plans. The result was a muddle that has given Romney new life. The president had too many conflicting thoughts bouncing around his head and could never quite reconcile his desire to attack Romney with his fear of alienating voters by appearing angry or unpresidential. For all that’s been written about his flop in front of roughly 67 million viewers, the reality, according to the people who know him best, is that he just wasn’t in the right headspace. With Obama, it’s not just about will - it’s always about mood, too. If there’s one thing I know about him, it’s this: He’s not going to get rattled and he’ll be more than ready the next time.” “He’s been through all of the ups and downs for a long time in this business. “That’s not surprising,” said Obama’s former press secretary Robert Gibbs, now a campaign surrogate. It’s a cliché in his camp that Obama only feels really motivated when his own destruction is in sight, but the magnitude of his lousy performance clearly motivated him as he plunged back into campaigning. It reminded several aides close to the president of his response to Hillary Clinton’s stunning comeback win in the New Hampshire primary in 2008. His mood was radically different Thursday - not just calm but buoyant, loose, focused. In his place, suddenly, was someone doing a pretty good impersonation of Obama ’08. Gone was the distracted, deer-in-headlights mumbler.

But it was the president who seemed to be a totally different guy on Thursday. Hours after arguably the worst debate performance of his career, Obama charged that Romney is a different man than the guy he faced Wednesday. He huddled with his inner circle - David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Valerie Jarrett, Anita Dunn, Ron Klain and Jim Messina - and settled on the theme they hammered all of Thursday - a direct attack on Romney that accused him of out-and-out lying on his tax-cut claims and portrayed the former Massachusetts governor as a two-faced imposter willing to say anything to win. He was subdued but positive on a conference call with staff. It was worse than he thought, according to one person close to the situation. But he began Thursday morning by watching excerpts of his own performance and was especially struck by his own tentative, grim demeanor - especially when he and a more relaxed Mitt Romney were broadcast in split-screen. At first, Obama didn’t think his performance was a complete disaster.

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