Obama's debate implosion, by Andrew Harrar/Bloomberg via Getty Images

By Emily Theroux

One short week ago, President Barack Obama was on top of his game, running 2-7 points ahead in 11 battlefield state polls, thanks to the wave of so-called “waitress moms” (white, blue-collar women without college educations) who had swung the incumbent’s way after his rival’s May fundraiser videotape — which disparaged 47 percent of Americans as irredeemable moochers malingering on taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars —  came to light.

At the time, Obama enjoyed an eye-popping 18 percent margin among all likely women voters. That astonishing lead, however, evaporated after “Mendacious Mitt” Romney used the first presidential debate to flip-flop his way back into the good graces of working-class white women and win over undecided voters. Meanwhile, Obama largely stood by without calling Romney out on his lies.

The MittBot had been in virtual freefall for two weeks before the debate. Obama appeared poised to outshine his badly stumbling opponent by highlighting Romney’s “severely conservative” agenda. I expected the president to mount the stage in Denver and chip away at MittWit’s “47 percent” videotape debacle, then spotlight Mitt’s reluctance to present a detailed picture of what he actually intends to do in office. Obama would likely close by hammering home the question he has posed rhetorically to Romney throughout the race: “What are you hiding in all of those undisclosed tax returns?”

Willard "Etch A Sketch" Romney is like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates. You never know which one you're going to get.

But the Republican candidate who showed up for the debate was a new, improved Mitt Romney, freshly cranked out of the Etch A Sketch for some 70 million TV viewers, many of whom hadn’t listened to a word from either candidate before that evening. Multiple Choice Mitt was free to be whoever he wanted to be — with or without the consent of Rush Limbaugh, Erick Erickson, or Ann Coulter.

The centrist GOP pol who turned up on that stage was no “severe conservative.” Obama looked as astonished as any well-informed voter at the modulated, almost-reasonable sound bites that emerged from Romney’s mouth. The problem was that the low-info crowd who usually ignore politics didn’t know the difference.

‘I think it’s fair to say I was just too polite,’ said Obama.

My take on the president’s lackluster performance? Obama took the stage armed with thoughtful retorts to the wingnut demagoguery his opponent had been parroting for the previous 18 months. When Romney reversed one after another of his extremist talking points, Obama was stunned into a perplexed ennui.* He may have been thrown off his game by the previous night’s “race speech” brouhaha, and perhaps he even submitted to a last-minute appeal from his Chicago team to stay cool and fly under the radar.

But whatever the reason for Obama’s apparent malaise, the approach failed miserably. “I think it’s fair to say I was just too polite,”  Obama mused a week later. “Because, you know, sometimes it’s hard to just keep on saying, ‘What you’re saying isn’t true.’ It gets repetitive.”

Massachusetts Mitt stood up there dishing out plausible-sounding positions as if he’d never carried water for Hannity and El Rushbo. His erstwhile “parasitic” 47 percenters — the low-wage workers who keep Uncle Sam at bay by claiming Reagan-era tax credits — slurped it up with a white plastic spork.

Plutocrat Mitt told a roomful of “have-mores” that these have-nots were professional “victims” whom he wasn’t even going to worry about during his elitist presidential run — yet Everyman Mitt smirked through his lying teeth, gushed about “our poor,” and might as well have called them “my base.”

Will the “real” Mitt Romney please stand up?

* A Daily Kos blogger, AmBushed, theorized that Romney used a debate technique known as “the Gish Gallop,” which, according to the Urban Dictionary, “involves spewing so much BS in such a short span that your opponent can’t address let alone counter all of it. To make matters worse, a Gish Gallop will often have one or more ‘talking points’ that has a tiny core of truth to it, making the person rebutting it spend even more time debunking it in order to explain that, yes, it’s not totally false, but the Galloper is distorting/misusing/misstating the actual situation.”

Underwhelmed by Massachusetts Mitt’s debating style

By the second time out of four that Romney repeated his favorite bald-faced anti-Obama lie — “Obama is going to steal $716 billion from your Medicare benefits” — without a sign of challenge or retort from the president, I knew Obama’s chances of winning the debate were in peril. The problem was that he didn’t know it. Obama was subdued, pensive, professorial, and working harder to corral his obvious scorn than he did to make forceful debate points.

Romney’s performance, however, was appalling. He was shifty-eyed, devious, oblique, and overbearing. He lied shamelessly and with few challenges from the moderator, made up his own rules for the debate, and contradicted every position he has ever claimed he espoused throughout the campaign. “OmniMitt the Apostate” argued the right, left, and center positions of every issue. He abandoned his own party’s platform, uttering heresy after heresy against conservative orthodoxy.

Does Mitt Romney even privately believe in any of the things he says, or does he simply practice situation ethics, selecting a “core belief” to match every occasion? He’s altered his “message” so many times in the past week that it’s giving me vertigo. The “severely conservative” primary candidate, with his hard-right bromides about tax cuts, regulations, and mandatory vaginal probes, changes his opinions on taxes and abortion nowadays more often than women change their tampons.

Yet Romney continues to deny his Etch A Sketch rap. “You want to know my position on issues?” he challenged a journalist. “Ask me, and I’ll tell you.”

And what would he tell you? It depends on his mood, his audience, his campaign’s current machinations, and the edicts of the far right. One day, he’s fiercely pro-life; the next, he doesn’t foresee acting on any kind of anti-abortion proposal. Yesterday, he railed against regulating business; today, he insists some type of regulation is essential. Throughout his campaign, he promised a 20 percent, across-the-board tax cut; during the debate, he flatly rejected its $5 trillion price tag. Mitt disputed his own positions on energy independence, cutting Medicare funding for current seniors, and firing teachers. He also assured debate viewers he would keep Obamacare’s popular “pre-existing conditions” provision (an assertion his campaign staff immediately  “walked back” offstage).

In the end, the only really consistent principle Romney has followed is that it doesn’t really matter what he says from one day to the next. If he works enough variation into the mix, he succeeds in confusing voters, confounding his critics, and backing his opponent into a corner. Obama now understands why his own straightforward, linear approach has worked against him thus far. As a general rule, Republicans believe the end justifies the means, while Democrats view that type of dissembling as a moral failing. If they’re not using the same playbook, how can the “right-versus-might” team get a jump on the “anything goes” crowd?

“Last week, Mitt Romney was the Lance Armstrong of politics, using performance-enhancing lies to win the debate,” MSNBC’s Martin Bashir observed.

How do you catch a dancing laser beam, or snag a really slippery fish while it’s furiously flipping in and out of the water?

“MittFlop” never promised to fight fair — or to hold still while Obama struggled to bait his hook.