One of the delights of Twitter, I am rapidly discovering, is that it relieves you of the obligation to think for yourself. You fire up your home page, and there they are: rolling news plus a handy collection of ready-made conclusions about practically everything under the sun. Take last night’s Republican Presidential debate, which was scheduled to end at ten o’clock.

At 9:54, Ezra Klein, the Washington Post’s überwonk, tweeted, “Debate wrap: Romney won. Not-Romney, not-Romney, not-Romney, not-Romney, not-Romney, not-Romney and not-Romney didn’t.” Two minutes later, my esteemed colleague Ryan Lizza asked, “Perry supporters, what’s best case for Perry success tonight? Am I being too harsh saying he’s mortally wounded?” At 9:59, Donna Brazile, the veteran Democratic Party strategist, pronounced: “Tonight’s winners … Romney and Cain (9-9-9). Losers: Perry and Huntsman. Perry needed to score big and Huntsman needed to win big.”

And that, pretty much, was that—or so I thought as I sat down to write this post. With the candidates still on the stage in Hanover, the narrative of the new mainstream media, which is what Twitter must now be regarded as, had already been articulated and distributed. Watching a couple of the political shows after the debate finished, I didn’t see any of the talking heads diverge from it. Indeed, most of them appeared to have been checking their smart phones for guidance: Perry “came in on a downward trend,” Matthew Dowd, the former Bush campaign strategist, said on Bloomberg Television. “He didn’t do anything to change that trend.”

In a sense, this represents progress. Rather than having to listen to grizzled Washington pundits stating the obvious in post-debate commentaries and columns, we now have clued-in young reporters like Ezra and Ryan, as well as knowledgeable insiders such as Brazile, to provide us with cheat sheets in real time. But did Romney and Cain really “win” the debate, and was it such a disaster for Perry? Absent new polling data from Republican voters, it was impossible to fact-check the Twitter narrative.

For what it is worth, I basically agreed with that narrative. However, from where I was sitting, the debate had mainly confirmed what we already knew. Mitt Romney 2.0 is a slick and formidable candidate—c.f. the impressive manner in which he turned around Perry’s question about his controversial Massachusetts health-care plan, pointing out that Texas now has more than a million children without health insurance, and ending with the statement, “I care about people.” Herman Cain is the only candidate with a distinctive economic plan and a direct, folksy speaking manner. Perry is struggling mightily in the major leagues. Given a chance to refute Romney’s attacks with a defense of his own Texas health-care reforms, he instead chose to bang on about Medicare block grants. Evidently, he had come up with a new jobs plan based on exploiting America’s energy resources. But rather than detailing it to a national audience, he promised to roll it out in the coming days, when his media following would mainly consist of campaign correspondents on death watch.

And yet, to answer Ryan’s tweet, I thought it was a bit premature to say Perry was mortally wounded, even if, as the Times’ David Leonhardt informed us in a tweet shortly after the debate finished, Intrade, an online political futures market, “now gives Assad a larger chance of being ousted this year (15%) than Perry of being the R nominee (13%).” For all his errors of omission, Perry hadn’t made any obvious gaffes. By his standards, this was a big improvement. Despite his poor performances in the previous debates and the controversy over the existence of a racial slur on a gatepost at his family’s hunting lodge, he seemed to still have an opportunity to turn things around. It was three months until the first primary. In this media-addled age, that is practically an eternity. He wasn’t in any immediate danger of running out of money—he reportedly has fifteen million dollars in the bank. And his polling numbers were so low that if he staged any sort of resurgence it would have enabled him to repackage himself as the Comeback Kid.

Then I checked Twitter again, and saw this update from Ryan: “Perry post-debate: ‘Reason we fought the revolution in the 16th century was to get away from that kind of onerous crown.’ ” Uh, oh! A few minutes later, Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at the Atlantic, tweeted this obituary: “The hashtag for the implosion of the Perry campaign is #perryhistory.”

Indeed, he may be. But the Twitter campaign, I would say (confidently if not exactly originally) is going to have more staying power.

Photograph by Toni Sandys/The Washington Post via Getty Images.