By Tom Bevan - October 4, 2012

Barack Obama's campaign team spent the last week talking up Mitt Romney's debating skills and talking down the president's. Turns out they were right on both counts.

From the moment the two men walked on stage Wednesday night in Denver, the former governor of Massachusetts took control of the proceedings and never relinquished his grip. Throughout the 90-minute debate, Romney was focused, firm, and at times funny, while aggressively assailing the president's record and simultaneously laying out a detailed vision for voters of what a Romney presidency would look like.

Obama, by contrast, appeared flat, defensive, and spent most of his time looking down at the lectern or seeming annoyed. Two days before the debate, Obama had lamented to a campaign volunteer that debate prep was “a drag.” That attitude certainly showed last night.

To be fair, the president had a far more difficult task in defending his first-term record amid what has been a perpetually lackluster economy. Even so, Obama did a tepid job of making his case for another four years, and was inexplicably ineffective as a counterpuncher.

There was no mention of Romney’s “47 percent” remark that had caused his campaign such grief with the media over the last couple of weeks. No mention of Romney’s time at Bain Capital, or of his tax returns. Obama invoked the auto bailout once, but only in passing -- and this is an issue he has been pounding Romney on, particularly in the critical battleground state of Ohio.

Instead, it was Romney who did the pounding last night, assailing the president’s record on the two most important issues of the campaign -- the economy and jobs.

“My priority is putting people back to work in America,” Romney said during an exchange early in the debate. “They're suffering in this country. And we talk about evidence. Look at the evidence of the last four years. It's absolutely extraordinary. We've got 23 million people out of work or stopped looking for work in this country. When the president took office, 32 million people on food stamps; 47 million on food stamps today; economic growth this year slower than last year, and last year slower than the year before. Going forward with the status quo is not going to cut it for the American people who are struggling today.”

In that one exchange, the GOP nominee did what he and all his party’s surrogates were unable to do in three days during their Tampa convention: succinctly sum up the rationale for a Romney presidency. Romney’s performance was so dominating that even Obama’s staunchest supporters -- including members of his campaign team and the cheerleaders at MSNBC -- were forced to concede Romney won the debate. And they were not happy about it.

Chris Matthews got more than a tingle up his leg Wednesday night watching Obama, berating the president for not putting up more of a fight for liberalism, as the pundits do on his network.

“Where was Obama tonight? There's a hot debate going on in this country. You know where it's been held? Here on this network is where we’re having the debate," Matthews fumed. “We have our knives out. We go after the people and the facts. What was he doing tonight? He went in there disarmed.”

After being on the defensive and taking a beating from the media for the better part of the last month, Romney needed a solid performance to regain his footing and change the prevailing narrative that his campaign was headed for certain defeat. He accomplished that, and may have done more. Snap polling done after the debate showed Romney scoring well with uncommitted voters and improving the perception that he cares about middle-class voters -- perhaps undoing the damage caused by his "47 percent" remark.

Now it’s the incumbent who is suddenly on the defensive -- with just under five weeks until Election Day. He will have to wait nearly two weeks before he has a chance to redeem himself in the second debate.

Debates rarely change the fundamental dynamics of a campaign, and this one may not have either. In the end, because of the economy, this was always likely to be a close race. But debates do provide opportunities for candidates to help themselves or hurt themselves in small ways that can be crucial to the final outcome of campaigns -- and last night we saw both. Stay tuned, because the race just got a lot more interesting.