"At Tuesday’s Hofstra University presidential debate, President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney duked it out over pay equity for women, just as they have fought over female votes in the national polls.
 
"While Obama made the empathetic case for his single mother and his belief in equal pay ... he did not address reports this year that demonstrated that his own White House pays women less than men. ... 

"According to a report published by the Free Beacon in April, the 2011 annual report on White House staff revealed that the median annual salary for female White House employees was 18 percent less than male employees — $60,000 compared to $71,000. 

"And in 2008, Scripps Howard syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock noted that as in Obama’s U.S. Senate office, women were paid less than men: While the average male staffer brought home $54,397, female staffers averaged $45,152."

"How it must gall President Barack Obama’s reelection team to try to talk down Mitt Romney by talking up his talent. 'He is a great salesman,' top Obama strategist David Axelrod said on Fox News Sunday. 'That is what he did as a professional; he is very good at it.' ...   

"There is a delicious irony in Obama’s aides complaining of someone else’s superior salesmanship. Do they have no self-awareness? They might want to reacquaint themselves with how Barack Obama became president. It wasn’t his long record of legislative achievement. It wasn’t his executive experience. It wasn’t his fine-grained agenda. It was a winning smile, a great narrative, and a slogan that fit the temper of the moment: 'Hope and change.' Not to mention a determined effort to obscure and sand away the rough edges of his leftism. It was, in short, a great sales job.
 
"For the Obama campaign to turn around and complain that Mitt Romney is just too persuasive is like the late, great TV pitchman Billy Mays warning that the other guy is better at peddling OxiClean."

"What if we’ve already had an October surprise in this campaign, in September, and the mainstream media are failing to follow up? An issue becomes a real issue only if enough people give it the attention it’s due. 

"Many people in the diplomatic and intelligence communities say that the Obama administration, behind the scenes, is in complete disarray in the aftermath of al-Qaeda’s attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. ... 

"It’s no surprise that everyone in and around the Obama administration is trying to keep the lid on the Libyan scandal. It’s also not surprising that the media — so far — haven’t been asking nearly enough questions about the administration’s conduct in the scandal."

"You don’t win a nationally televised debate by being rude and obnoxious.  You don’t win by interrupting your opponent time after time after time or by being a blowhard.  You don’t win with facial expressions, especially smirks or fake laughs, or by pretending to be utterly exasperated with what your opponent is saying. 
 
"That’s why Vice President Joe Biden didn’t win the one and only debate last night with his Republican rival, Mitt Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan.  ... 

"There’s a way to disagree with your opponent without acting like a jerk.  The most recent example:  Romney’s firm but polite disagreements with Obama in their debate last week.  One can be assertive but affable, tough but cool.  Come to think of it, that was Obama’s style in the entire 2008 presidential race.  It worked brilliantly.  Biden did the opposite in front of tens of millions of American voters.  It didn’t work brilliantly."

"The election campaign of the 44th U.S. president is now calling another candidate for the American presidency a 'liar.' This is a new low. It is amazing and depressing to hear this term being used as a formal strategy by people at the highest level of American politics. ... 

"It will be interesting which variation of 'lie' -- if any -- comes out of Joe Biden's mouth in his debate with Paul Ryan. Mr. Biden comes from a political generation that could play rough, but it knew the limits of going too low at the presidential level. Or used to."

"Remember when President Obama bragged about Joe Biden's fiscal discipline cred in 2009? 'To you, he's Mr. Vice President, but around the White House, we call him the Sheriff,' Obama warned government employees. 'Because if you're misusing taxpayer money, you'll have to answer to him.' 

"Fast-forward to 2012. Call in the search teams. Since being appointed the nation's stimulus spending cop, Sheriff Joe has taken a permanent donut break. He's AWOL on oversight. In fact, he's been bubble-wrapped, boxed and kept completely out of sight. The garrulous gaffe machine hasn't sat down for a national media interview in five months. 

"The Democrats' trillion-dollar 'American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,' however, keeps piling up waste, failure, fraud and debt. Who benefited most? Big government cronies."

"To the millions of Americans unable to find work, to college graduates who can't get a job and are living with their parents, to the underemployed who are working at jobs far below their skill set and experience, and to those who have given up looking for work altogether, a 7.8 percent unemployment rate is meaningless. The economy stinks. 

"And try as they might -- and they are trying mightily to rescue a man they sold to voters four years ago as a political messiah -- major media can't seem to transform a failing president into a success."

"Vice presidential debates typically matter as much as vice presidential picks — which is to say not a lot — but a convergence of factors is raising the stakes on this week’s faceoff between Paul Ryan and Vice President Joe Biden. 

"Looming most heavy over the clash in Kentucky is President Barack Obama’s remarkably weak debate performance last week, a showing that has given Republicans their first sense of hope in weeks and increased the pressure on Biden to get Democrats back on course. ... 

"If 'Gentleman Joe' took the stage four years ago, determined not to come off as patronizing or bullying Sarah Palin, it seems almost certain that Thursday will bring the appearance of 'Scranton Joe,' the scrappy pol who’s never been afraid to throw a punch. ... 

"Ryan’s reputation as a master explainer also ups the ante."

"The impact of the first debate is going to be bigger than we know. It's going to affect thinking more than we know, and it's going to start showing up in the polls, including in the battlegrounds, more dramatically than we guess. 

"It wasn't just Mitt Romney's strong performance. It was President Obama's amazingly weak one. He's never been punctured before. But by debate's end Wednesday night, if you opened the window this is what you could hear: Ssssssss. The soft hiss of air departing from a balloon. ... 

"[T]his whole race is on the move again, it's in play again, and it's going to get fun.

"But it's going to get hot, too. And probably dirty."

"The first presidential debate of 2012 took place at the University of Denver and was between Obama and Mitt Romney. But only Romney showed up. ... 

"'I think this was a terrific debate,' Obama said near the end of the evening. 

"And it was. For Mitt Romney."