At the first debate, the president gave off such a feeling of ennui, he could have used a fainting couch. It suddenly made many voters who thought it only fair that Obama get another term, given the mountain of trouble W. had left behind, wonder if that second chance would be embraced with energy, imagination and zest.

And the race is vise-tight because Mitt’s a marvel. Never in modern memory has a presidential candidate so brazenly contorted himself, switching positions to suit the moment and pushing claims, like about Obama’s imaginary “apology tour,” that have been debunked.

But as Bill Clinton warned the Obama team last year, attacking Romney as a flip-flopper, as the president did Monday night in Boca Raton, can help Mitt with centrist voters who like the idea that he’s actually a sheep in Wolfowitz clothing.

Forgoing his Klingon rhetoric, Mitt played cling-on to Obama’s Spock, suddenly clutching onto the president’s positions on China (which he said had made “progress” on trade), Iran, the Afghanistan deadline, drones and ousting Hosni Mubarak. Romney was running so far to the left of Obama that he never even mentioned the tangled White House response to the Benghazi consulate slaughter, which Republicans on the Hill have been working tirelessly to tee up for him.

In the surest sign that Mitt had donned a more soothing costume, he even made a flattering reference to the United Nations, the bête noire of his hawkish neocon foreign policy advisers.

But it was no doubt the neocons who coached Romney to sheath the bayonet to neutralize Obama charges of warmongering. In The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol urged Mitt to be “pre-presidential.” (Sort of like pre-emptive war.) He advised Romney to speak at the debate “in a bipartisan way” and appeal “to the broad American tradition of international leadership, and to the actions of Harry Truman as well as those of Ronald Reagan.” He advised praising “our diplomats” and “finding something to praise in the actions of President Obama.”