Eric Gay / AP

Mitt Romney was fired up and ready to go Wednesday in Denver, turning in a performance that exceeded expectations and had President Obama on the defensive for much of the night. “It’s fun, isn’t it,” Romney exclaimed when moderator Jim Lehrer noted the candidates had gone over the time limit on the first segment—and no wonder.

Saul Loeb / AFP-Getty Images

For a year, Mitt Romney has been trying to pretend he’s Ronald Reagan. Wednesday night he did something much smarter: He acted like George W. Bush.I mean the George W. Bush of 2000. In 2000, Bush’s strategists made a savvy calculation.

Nicholas Kamm / AFP-Getty Images

I bedded down for this debate, Scotch in hand, expecting to be bored five ways to rigor mortis. Instead, I was jolted upright by a Mitt Romney who seemed, himself, to have been jolted upright by the prospect of doing or dying.

Saul Loeb / AFP-Getty Images

This was supposed to be a debate about the economy–— the gripping, all-consuming question. How is the creaky engine of global growth performing? How can it boost demand and soak up all the unemployed and underemployed? What should be done about the crisis of unemployment? About housing? How can America compete in global markets? And how does the state of play in the global markets affect the economic experience of individuals?That’s not what happened.

Eric Gay / AP Photo

If you just dropped by the Earth en route Venus from Mars (or the other way around) and watched this debate you would be hard-pressed to know who was the incumbent president and who was the challenger. From the very start of the debate, it was clear that Mitt Romney knew what was at stake and had taken this seriously.

Doug Pensinger / Getty Images

DENVER—Barack Obama and Mitt Romney forcefully clashed over their contrasting economic views in their first debate Wednesday night, with the challenger displaying more energy and crispness than the languid and long-winded president.

David Goldman / AP Photo

Happy Anniversary, ‘Sweetie’!  President Obama kicked off the debate with a shoutout to his wife, Michelle. “Twenty years ago,” he said, “I became the luckiest man on earth because Michelle Obama agreed to marry me.” Romney must have been anticipating the sentimental gesture, though, because it prompted his first zinger of the night.

Chris Schneider / AP Photo

Watch the first 2012 presidential debate right here, live from the University of Denver in Denver, Colo.

Kevin Dietsch, UPI / Landov

PBS NewsHour's Jim Lehrer will be playing the thankless role of moderator in the first of the 2012 presidential debates, which kicks off tonight at 9 p.m. ET streaming live right here on The Daily Beast. The debate will focus on domestic policy, with a heavy look at the economy.

Charlie Neibergall / AP Photo

Tonight, President Barack Obama and former governor Mitt Romney will step onto the stage for the first of perhaps the most consequential series of presidential debates in American history. What is at stake is only matched by the premium Americans have grown to place on the art of political debate itself.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP Photo

Conservative media outlets trumpeted a five-year-old video of Barack Obama on Tuesday night in which he talked about urban despair, the Los Angeles riots and Hurricane Katrina but made only glancing references to race.Despite claims that the tape was a racially charged “bombshell,” it shows Obama as a presidential candidate speaking at Virginia’s historically black Hampton University in June 2007—and, according to BuzzFeed, at least part of it has existed online since then.

Charles Dharapak / AP Photo

So here we go. Mitt Romney’s game-change moment. Banking on low expectations, on the universal expectation that Barack Obama is going to throttle or at least out-score him, and on those now-famous prepared zingers, Romney will use the first debate to turn everything around, right? Well, he might.

FAIL: Michael Dukakis’s ‘Weak’ Death Penalty Answer If your wife were raped and murdered, would you want the perpetrator put to death? That was the question put to the Massachusetts governor during the 1988 presidential debate, about his wife, Kitty.

Julie Jacobson / AP Photo

By the vast preponderance of harsh judgment, even from conservative poobahs like William Kristol and Peggy Noonan, Mitt Romney has a bad campaign. Who in the world with any sense would have drafted that hasty, ill-informed charge that President Obama sympathized with terrorists during the assault on American diplomats in Egypt and Libya? But it’s not just the campaign that’s bad; it’s the bad candidate who approved that statement, wrote his own junior league acceptance speech, and on the tape at a now notorious fundraiser seemed so uncharacteristically comfortable—with his own kind—while condescendingly writing off half the country as victims unworthy of his concern.