Newt’s biggest problem so far: no questioner has given him the chance for the big finger-pointing moment.

From TPM Reader MF …

Despite this being a close debate, I don’t think it’s going well for Newt even if he still looks pretty good. Newt needs to run roughshod over the debates or his balloon deflates pretty quickly. His whole surge is predicated on the notion that he’s going to tell Obama he’s a foreign Muslim Communist to his face, so doing OK isn’t really going to cut it for him. In that sense Romney has an ongoing advantage even if he’s never going to look as self-satisfied as Gingrich does up there. Mitt just needs to expose a few chinks in the armor.

10:31 PM: Don’t think that cut it for Mitt on what he’s done for conservatism.

When Mitt tried to take Newt to task for trying to make his taxes even lower than the 15% he pays now. Just not an argument that works well for Mitt.

10:38 PM: So many times over this. But I just don’t think Romney gets that most people don’t think it’s funny that you made someone take out a mortgage on their home. It’s low level 10k bet, like to fire people who provide me services, etc., just not funny.

10:42 PM: I think Newt helped himself with those concluding remarks.

So what just happened?

My basic read is that the debate all happened in the first 20 or 30 minutes. Romney was brutal and totally on message, hitting a series of key attack lines where Gingrich is just extremely vulnerable. But then Newt came back and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quite as on his game as his was tonight. He didn’t get a chance to have one of those Newt explosion minutes. But just for rolling with the punches, finding openings to get right back in Mitt’s face and more than anything playing that frontrunner card which must have driven Mitt to distraction. Watching it I remember thinking, wow, this is a sort of an amazing moment just in terms of political theatrics because both of them really brought their A games, both of which are very different things. Read More

In the spin room after tonight’s debate Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom told reporters that they believe the Romney tax return story will end tomorrow, with the release of a single year’s returns.

He also signaled they’ll make their case on the dollar amount Romney paid in taxes, rather than the percentage of his income and the fact that he gave a lot to charity.

We’ve got the first report about Romney’s 2010 taxes. His effective tax rate was 13.9%, just below the 15% he estimated last week. Here are the initial details.

Key passage from Reuters story …

Romney advisers stressed that the holdings in the Caymans — along with those in a Swiss bank account that was closed in 2010 after an investment adviser decided it could be politically embarrassing to Romney — were reported on tax returns and were not vehicles to avoid taxes.

My quick take on this is that there’s a lot here that’s fairly damaging for Romney in political terms, largely for the reasons I set forth earlier in this post. Beyond that there’s a lesson about the consequences of losing control of events. For a man running for president in 2012 it’s damaging stuff. But now everything in these documents comes with a preface that reads “We really wanted to keep this secret. But that didn’t work out.”

We’ve got a fourth poll of Florida out this morning. And it has Romney up by 2 points over Gingrich, 34% to 32%. The first three had Newt up by either 9 or 5 points.

Mitt Romney got tripped up with a tax issue when he ran for governor in 2002 too.