Obama camp tells reporters they’ve got their post debate plan: Hammer Romney’s lies and evasions in the debate.

Obama, in his first public appearance since the debate: “When I got on to the stage, I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney.”

Axelrod on Obama’s debate performance: “We have to strike a balance. You can’t allow someone to stand there and basically manhandle the truth about their own record and ideas … and not deal with that. So I’m sure that is a takeaway from this debate.”

This is the whole deal. Romney lied through his teeth about his tax policy, which would give huge cuts to high income earners and big increases for most middle class families. He just said it wasn’t so. But it is so. It’s just math. Big tax increases on almost everybody except the wealthiest folks.

He also straight up lied about pre-existing conditions. His top advisor admitted his plan doesn’t cover those people just a few minutes after the debate.

The political question is: Can the Obama team put that reality and Romney’s lying back in the center of the debate. The next few days will tell us.

The critics weigh in on Jim Lehrer’s anemic performance as moderator.

TPM’s Evan McMorris-Santoro bravely entered the spin room in Denver after the debate … and emerged with actual news.

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina last night in Denver on why Obama never mentioned the 47 percent: “It just didn’t come up in the debate. It wasn’t a deliberate decision.”

Looking at the reaction Democrats and the Obama campaign are having to the debate this morning, I sense some may be making a form of the mistake I said President Obama made last night.

Are they coming to have a discussion or coming to make a point? Debates are seldom graded by the debates themselves. The verdict comes as people and the press pick apart what was said over a period of news cycles. Read More

Chris Matthews’ post-debate rant on Obama’s performance (plus special network promo-fest). Watch.

(Ed. Note: See updates below.)

Getting a massive amount of coverage this morning is the CNN snap poll of the debate, which showed Romney winning the exchanged overwhelmingly.

But the internals of the poll look really strange. If you look at the breakdown of the sample, it doesn’t appear to contain anyone (or doesn’t appear to contain any representative sample) under 50, anyone outside of the South or anyone who’s not white. (See page 8 of this pdf.)

I doesn’t make sense to me that they’d do or release a poll like that. So really curious if anyone has an explanation. Read More