Wednesday night, Mitt Romney punctured the balloon that was Barack Obama’s inflated reputation as a debater and communicator. \u00a0I guess having a hollow core and thin skin is a bad combination.<\/p>\n

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Romney did this largely by turning out not to be the stick figure that Obama had been running against for the last 18 months, and which he had apparently internalized as actually being the actual Mitt Romney. \u00a0So in some respects, the left’s and the Democrats’ disillusionment with Obama is a result of Obama’s disillusionment with the opponent his campaign constructed for him. \u00a0So far, his only response has been to complain that Mitt the Man is a better candidate than Mitt the Myth, and to argue that Mitt must have been lying during the debate. \u00a0Romney’s campaign has responded with an ad calling Obama on his own campaign’s admission<\/a> that Romney’s proposed net tax cut won’t be any near $5 trillion, an admission echoed by the media “fact-checkers” that, up until now, Obama had held up as the\u00a0Gold Standard of Absolute Truth.<\/p>\n