Saul Loeb / AFP

The first debate had Big Bird. The second debate had “binders full of women.” The Twitter-seizing, meme-sparking line came from Romney, who said that as part of an effort to appoint more women to leadership posts when he was governor of Massachusetts, he “went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.

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People at home may remember Barack Obama and Mitt Romney circling each other like wary gladiators. Folks online are wallowing in Romney saying that as governor he wanted "binders of women." But on television Wednesday, most of the talk about the second presidential debate centered on the flareup over Libya—which is exactly the way the Republicans want it.

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A couple of decades ago, I remember my family gathering around the television on Friday nights to watch weekly boxing matches. Last night’s debate had that same feel. The buildup was that the challenger had bested the reigning champ in the first bout and now the champ had to make a comeback.

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If anyone knows anything about having “binders full of women,” it’s the backwards-hat-wearing, iron-pumping heartthrob that is Paul Ryan. The congressman defended Romney’s viral debate comment, saying that all Mitt meant was that, as governor, he just wanted to hire “qualified women” for his administration.

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It’s no Big Bird, but it looks like the meme of the Hofstra University debate was Mitt Romney’s comment that women’s groups had brought him “binders full of women” when he sought to find qualified women to hire. The comment went viral: it was the third-most searched phrase on Google, a Tumblr called bindersfullofwomen.

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Who knew things could get so heated on Long Island? Early polls showed that a majority of viewers believed that an aggressive President Obama won Tuesday night’s debate at Hofstra University—although whether that victory will translate into a difference in polls is still unclear.

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Two presidential debates and no real mention of our troops, despite the ongoing war in Afghanistan.Here’s why: 68 percent of Americans think the war in Afghanistan is going somewhat or very badly, and the same percentage thinks we should withdraw entirely or start drawing down troops now.

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In a debate that mostly favored Barack Obama, one of the president’s more surprising victories came in the segment on the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, which took the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith.

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The town-hall-style showdown between presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and Barack Obama was facilitated by voters’ questions and filled with lies. From the three-way debate between the candidates and moderator Candy Crowley over the Obama administration’s handling of the U.

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What’s the best balm for weary Democratic nerves, anxious after a shaky first debate performance from President Obama two weeks ago? Why, beer of course, and so a string of bars on Fourth Avenue in south Park Slope, the bluest of neighborhoods in the bluest of cities in the bluest of states, offered drink specials and promised TVs devoted to tonight’s face-off between Obama and Mitt Romney.

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Well, Fox was calling it a draw, and its anchors started blaming Candy Crowley for how it all went down 32 seconds after it ended. Need to know anything else?Obama won the debate. Won it big. Maybe not as big as Romney won the first one, but big enough to be clear.

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Here is a major difference between liberals and conservatives. After President Obama’s abysmal performance in the first debate, liberals were rending their garments and proclaiming everything lost. After Mitt Romney’s equally bad performance on Tuesday night, many conservatives were either declaring him the winner or blaming his loss on Candy Crowley.

Mary Altaffer / AP Photo

The big question about the second debate of the presidential campaign—and perhaps the entire presidential campaign itself—is this: is this now a contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney or Mitt Romney and himself?If it’s the former, Obama won tonight.

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What a delicious debate that was, and how one wished that Candy Crowley could just wave a magic wand and give us an extra half hour (even if that meant being subjected to a few more of those utterly gormless “uncommitted voters” that they seemed to have in abundance at Hofstra.

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One of the reasons I think town-hall debates are a waste of time is that they tend to keep the candidates from engaging with each other. Neither wants to offend the audience of “regular Americans” before them—people so disinterested in the election that they claim they still can’t figure out how to vote.