Obama seemed to be a totally different guy on Thursday. | REUTERS How Obama reset his campaign

Nobody had to tell President Barack Obama he had whiffed when he walked off the stage in Denver Wednesday night — nor was he in the mood for a lot of advice.

“You could tell he was pissed,” said a person close to the president, “But it wasn’t like the end of the world. It was like, ‘That wasn’t good. The next one has to better.’ No apologies. No hand-wringing.”


( PHOTOS: Obama not having fun)

That night, after a brief, terse chat with his advisers backstage at the University of Denver arena — “He had real clarity about what had happened,” one of them told POLITICO with a chuckle — Obama hopped in his limo, “The Beast,” and sped off to a nearby DoubleTree with wife Michelle.

He had had enough of politics for the night.

( Also on POLITICO: Colorado debate transcript and full video)

Like he does almost every time something goes wrong, Obama eschewed the mea culpas — he’s not big on apologies in front of his staff — and shut down to think things over with the adviser whose company he values most in times of trouble: himself.

At first, Obama didn’t think his performance was a complete disaster. 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. It was worse than he thought, according to one person close to the situation. He was subdued but positive on a conference call with staff.

( PHOTOS: Scenes from Denver debate)

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.

Hours after arguably the worst debate performance of his career, Obama charged that Romney is a different man than the guy he faced Wednesday. But it was the president who seemed to be a totally different guy on Thursday. Gone was the distracted, deer-in-headlights mumbler. In his place, suddenly, was someone doing a pretty good impersonation of Obama ’08.

His mood was radically different Thursday — not just calm but buoyant, loose, focused. 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. 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.

“That’s not surprising,” said Obama’s former press secretary Robert Gibbs, now a campaign surrogate. “He’s been through all of the ups and downs for a long time in this business. 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.”

With Obama, it’s not just about will — it’s always about mood, too. 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. 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. The result was a muddle that has given Romney new life.

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. They also figured on him smiling a whole lot more, a key part of winning the body-language battle.

And, to the puzzlement of Democrats, he didn’t mention two of the most effective attack lines — Bain Capital and Romney’s “47 percent” video.

On Thursday, Plouffe told reporters on Air Force One that the omissions weren’t deliberate.

“Sure, there might have been an exchange where that came up,” he said of the video.

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.

“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.

For his part, Obama waited about 12 hours to start spinning his own post-debate comeback tale.

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.

“Thank God somebody is finally getting tough on Big Bird,” he said. “We didn’t know that Big Bird was driving the federal deficit. … 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.

“Look,” the person said, “That’s what he does when he’s really into it.”

Obama adopted the same posture a few hours later when he arrived in Madison, Wis., a liberal college town where he was greeted by his biggest crowd of the 2012 campaign. On Twitter, Romney supporters noticed the difference in Obama’s energy, too — and chalked it up to the presence Thursday of the teleprompter that had been absent the night before.

But the president and his entourage seemed to draw real energy, and a soupçon of solace, from the 30,000 supporters who showed up and the thousands more who lined North Park Street to wave at his motorcade.

Obama’s closest friend in the West Wing, Jarrett, sat with him as they drove in and seemed giddy at the crowd that rolled up Bascom Hill, first aiming her iPhone camera from field level, then ascending the camera riser for a better view, finally asking the technician who operated a hydraulic lift nearby to take her up for a better view.

“I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney,” Obama said hours earlier at the Denver rally. “But it couldn’t have been Mitt Romney because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. But the fellow on stage last night said he didn’t know anything about that.”

That might be true, but Obama will have to face that fellow again in less than two weeks at a town hall debate in Long Island, N.Y. And Romney’s performance has left real doubts, from Obama on down, about the president’s capacity to rack up a victory big enough to erase the memory of Wednesday’s defeat.

If Thursday’s Obama performance was any indication, he’s more likely to compensate for his shortcomings outside the debate hall — at rallies that fire up a base that had been less than enthusiastic earlier in the year and more recently has been inclined to believe he will trounce Romney.

“It’s not a positive by any means,” an Obama aide said. “But for our supporters, the debate was sort of helpful because they have assumed the race was locked up. It isn’t. But that message hasn’t been getting through. This might scare them.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the number of people who watched the first presidential debate.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Elizabeth Titus @ 10/05/2012 06:14 PM CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated the number of people who watched the first presidential debate.