It was a bad twentieth wedding anniversary night for Barack and Michelle Obama. Twenty-five should be better. No irritating debates to deal with. It won’t even be an election year. Maybe they can celebrate with a Mai Tai or two in their new beachfront home on Oahu.

All the networks agreed last night, even the court eunuchs on MSNBC, as did the polls and the focus groups, that Romney won the debate. Obama looked like a warmed-over version of Richard Nixon, shifty and evasive in his answers. But Nixon was always infinitely more prepared than our current president and considerably more informed.

The fuddy-duddy liberal choir of the mainstream media looked shell-shocked. But secretly some of them may actually be relieved. Anyone with an IQ in triple digits knows that Romney would be a better president than Obama with the country and the world in the situation they are. And that probably includes Obama himself, considering the level at which he debated.

If Romney is elected, dad would be back and they (the media) would get to be kids again, living la vida loca while protesting until blue in their collective faces everything Romney does in the coming years. They get to be “against the man” once more. They don’t have to defend the man, such as he is.

A few of these media folks may even subtly throw Obama under the bus – a just deserts since he has done that favor to so many others. We’ll have to see. It did seem to me while watching the debate that even moderator Jim Lehrer, try as he might to help the president, was starting to realize Romney was the better man. Even Ed Schultz and Bill Maher apparently tweeted that Romney had won, not that they would ever change their views short of a waterboarding — or even then.

But, in defense of Obama, there is a more significant reason he did so badly in the debate than his own relative ineptitude and dyspepsia. Liberalism, his ideology, is economically indefensible. It doesn’t work. He had, in reality, no response when confronted by Romney’s positions. When it comes to liberalism, there’s no there there (hence the outcry on the Left that he should have insulted Romney more, about the 47% etc.).

If Obama and/or his minions begin to think or realize that, they are really doomed. This will not be a normal election. Their world will be upended. But if they do continue and win, it will be even worse, because the country, and even Western civilization, will unravel quite quickly thereafter.

But I am more optimistic. What we may have witnessed on October 3, 2012, is the death of liberalism. And it deserves to die because it is a greedy and self-centered ideology masked under the pretense of generosity and guarded fiercely by wannabe media potentates like Chris Matthews who had the next thing to an aneurysm at the performance of his onetime idol.

Liberalism will come back, of course, under one or more of a million names. But for now Mitt Romney has administered it a serious body blow.

For much of the debate he seemed to be teaching the basics of economics to a recalcitrant and not particularly bright undergraduate.

This is not entirely surprising to those who remember 2008, when Obama seemed so clueless when queried about taxation and the Laffer curve by Charles Gibson of ABC.

Next debate will probably be different. Humiliations this extreme don’t happen often in politics and rarely twice in a row. But the first blood drawn between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will most likely be remembered above all.

One suspects the electorate wearies of these things fast. The first half hour of the first debate is usually about as much as most people can take, especially that odd and sought after group known as the “undecideds.”

We know who won that. For now the Peggy Noonan naysayers can go back in their holes. Mitt Romney is riding high. Let’s hope he stays there.

UPDATE:

Bigger Winners from Bebate: Bibi Netanyahu, Chris Christie.

Big Losers: Innocent citizens of Libya. Watch out below!