The skinny bookworm who sits in the front row can duke it out after all. All you have to do is call him a wuss, get the class bully—the Barber of Cranbrook—to taunt him and threaten to take away his personal plane, the one with its own conference room and O.R. Then, he comes out like Jake LaMotta, eyes flashing, gloves up, his malicious intent plain for all to see. Nobody could accuse him of having failed to do his prep for this one. Like Muhammad Ali, after being embarrassed in his first bout with Leon Spinks, he had put in the hours skipping rope, and rehearsed his combinations until he could unleash them at will, from all angles.

Enough of the boxing metaphors. Truly, though, it’s hard to avoid them. With the opinion polls turning against him and many of his supporters on the verge nervous breakdown, Obama desperately needed to put in a strong performance, and he did. An instant poll of uncommitted voters from CBS News, thirty-seven per cent said he won; thirty per cent said Romney won; and thirty-three per cent called it a tie. A poll of registered voters from CNN showed Obama winning by forty-six per cent to thirty-nine per cent. Coming out on top by seven per cent—the margin in both polls—is hardly an overwhelming victory, but, as they say in sports, a win is a win, and the Obama campaign will take it.

Just as important as the results in the instant polls was the fact that the overwhelming majority of the pundits proclaimed the President the victor. Even Charles Krauthammer and Laura Ingraham said that he won on points. With this type of unanimity, the media narrative for the next few days, which is at least as important as the debate itself, will run in favor of Obama and against Romney. The G.O.P. candidate, rather than being praised for having delivered a strong indictment of Obama’s economic record—the CBS News poll showed that sixty-five per cent of viewers thought he won the economic exchanges, against just thirty-seven per cent who thought Obama did—will be criticized for his blunders on Libya, guns, and women. (Amy Davidson has more on those.)

Whether this will be enough to halt Romney’s momentum in the polls remains to be seen: it certainly won’t help him. Next week’s final debate will be devoted entirely to foreign policy, which, as we saw last night, is hardly Romney’s strong point. For what it’s worth, and it’s not very much, the online-prediction markets, such as Intrade, suggested that Obama’s chances of winning increased by a couple of per cent during the debate. (At the British bookmakers, he remains a firm favorite.)

Still, this is a close race, and one in which Obama could ill afford another slipup. From the very first question, which was about how to create jobs for college graduates, he went on the attack, not even bothering to follow his opponent’s lead and thank Hofstra University, the Commission on Debates, or anybody else. This was a President on a mission, with no time for diplomatic niceties. After briefly laying out his own plan to boost manufacturing, invest in education, and reduce dependence on foreign sources of energy, he went for the jugular, accusing Romney of having wanted to let Detroit go bankrupt; saying he had a “one-point” economic plan—“to make sure that the folks at the top play by a different set of rules”—and lambasting the manner in which Romney made his fortune at Bain Capital, noting, “You can invest in a company, bankrupt it, lay off the workers, strip away their pensions, and you still make money.”

That was all before the second question, which was about energy policy. I swear I could hear liberals and Democrats all across the city—make that all across the country—leaping to their feet and shouting, “You go, Barack!” This was the Obama they had been looking for in Denver a couple of weeks ago, only to find some listless fellow who was evidently still sulking about having to miss an anniversary dinner with his wife. And he kept it up all night, taunting Romney about his low tax rate and the size of his pension; pointing out how he had changed his policies on issues like energy, immigration, and gun control; and zeroing in his biggest policy vulnerability: the fuzzy math underpinning his plan to cut income taxes across the board by twenty per cent while somehow balancing the budget:

Now, Governor Romney was a very successful investor. If somebody came to you, Governor, with a plan that said, here, I want to spend seven or eight trillion dollars, and then we’re going to pay for it, but we can’t tell you until maybe after the election how we’re going to do it, you wouldn’t take such a sketchy deal and neither should you, the American people, because the math doesn’t add up.

The debate organizers’ plan was to have thirteen questions and follow-ups. As usual, things got a bit backed up, and they got through eleven. On my scorecard, I had six rounds for Obama, two for Romney, and three tied. Romney’s wins came early, and they were both in answers to questions about economics. He vigorously attacked Obama’s record on energy, as he always does, and he calmly but effectively dissected the President’s economic record, repeatedly pointing out how he had failed to live up to the pledges that he made in 2008.

Half an hour in, I noted down that Obama was ahead, but not by very much. Then Romney, in answering a question about the disparity in wages between men and women who do the same jobs, pointed to his record of employing women in senior posts when he was the governor of Massachusetts. Except he put it like this: “I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.” I knew that one would cause an uproar on Twitter, and it did. By the end of the debate, there was already a Facebook page and a Tumblr with the name “bindersfullofwomen.”

If that was embarrassing for Romney, his misstatement about Obama’s reaction to the deaths at the American consulate in Benghazi was even more serious, if only because it is the sort of thing that journalists seize upon. The question itself, from an audience member named Kerry Ladka, was potentially a very damaging one to the President: “Who was it that denied enhanced security and why?” After Obama patently failed to answer the question, Romney should have shoved it right back at him. Instead, he accused the President of failing to call the killings a terrorist attack for fourteen days, when Obama, in his appearance in the Rose Garden a day after the killings, had clearly said: “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”