For all the perpetual punditry that continues to cast Barack Obama as the biggest debate loser in recorded history, Saturday Night Live may have landed the most devastating blow.

In a debate skit depicting the president as detached and daydreaming, the late-night show did more than make Obama look like a buffoon (which is, after all, its stock in trade). The bit cemented an image of Obama as totally checked out, hardly the kind of guy burning with desire for a second term.

Darrell Hammond, who famously played Bill Clinton and Al Gore on SNL, told me a couple of weeks ago that Obama was almost impossible to successfully parody because “he’s an elegant man with perfect speech.” Well, he’s a lot easier to lampoon now, and not just because Jay Pharoah does a better impersonation than Fred Armisen. The remoteness, the coolness, the lecturing style is now a liability.

If you missed it, Obama is shown daydreaming about what anniversary gift to get Michelle when the faux Jim Lehrer interrupts: “Mr. President, Governor Romney has just said that he killed Osama Bin Laden. Would you care to respond?” Obama, looking startled, replies: “No, you two go ahead.”

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.

It was a serious, respectful, somewhat wonky debate, notably devoid of zingers or dramatic moments, with Obama consistently more aggressive in challenging his opponent over his proposed tax cuts and slashes in domestic spending.

Stylistically, Romney came on strong, showing a confident command of facts and figures even as he tried to moderate or distance himself from some of his proposals. He also made direct eye contact with the camera while Obama often seemed to be looking down, never adjusting his intensity and acting like he was at a garden-variety news conference.

When I asked Charlie Cook whether the media were being too quick to assume that Barack Obama will win a second term, he said no.

Losing the election, he told me in a video interview, “will require a massive screwup by President Obama or some international event that just shakes everything up.” You can’t accuse the guy of mincing words.

“Romney’s got a week to turn this thing around,” the veteran political analyst told me. Otherwise “Republicans going to hit the panic button” and start pouring their money into saving congressional seats.

 Mitt Romney’s head must be spinning.

 Everyone is deluging him with advice about Wednesday’s debate: Be aggressive but not too aggressive, be bold but reassuring, be specific but don’t get in the weeds, and have a ready supply of zingers.

 Which is why I was struck by this passage in National Revview: “Romney’s advisers have a simple strategy: They want their candidate to balance his finely tuned arguments with personal warmth.”

  Oh, now he has to feel people’s pain, too?

For a conservative commentator, David Brooks gets plenty of flak from the right. And he doesn’t much care.

“If it’s from a loon, I don’t mind it,” the New York Times columnist tells me in a video interview. “I get a kick out of it. If it’s from Michelle Malkin attacking, I don’t mind it.” But if it’s “people who are thoughtful,” including some former colleagues at the Weekly Standard, “then it bothers you.”

Even worse, says Brooks: “I don’t mind liberals praising me, but when it’s the really partisan liberals, you get an avalanche of love, it’s like uhhh, I gotta rethink this.”

It is probably not much of an overstatement to say that Arthur Ochs Sulzberger saved The New York Times.

Sulzberger, who died Saturday at 86, was a behind-the-scenes eminence who quietly guided the nation’s premiere newspaper through a turbulent period. He was a throwback to an earlier era, when men—they were almost always men—treated a newspaper as a public trust (which is, of course, easier to do when your family controls the voting stock).

But in a 34-year career as Times publisher and as CEO and chairman of The New York Times Co., the man known as Punch diversified the operation in a way that guaranteed its future. His son, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., is the current publisher and chairman.

Things have gotten so bad for Mitt Romney that abruptly releasing his tax returns must seem like a welcome respite.

Battered by criticism of his “47 percent” video, dropping in the polls and battling a general sense that the election is slipping away, the Republican nominee is choosing to return to an issue on which Democrats have been hammering him for months.

That’s right, talking about his tens of millions of dollars in investment income, and a lower tax rate than some workers pay, now constitutes a positive development for Romney—because it enables him to change the subject.

Steve Schmidt knows something about trying to steer a presidential campaign out of the ditch when much of the world is saying the wheels have come off.

In Schmidt’s case, helping to draft Sarah Palin to push John McCain over the finish line led to years of regret, as well as an unexpected measure of fame when he was sympathetically portrayed by Woody Harrelson in Game Change. So I thought Schmidt, having lost the 2008 contest to Barack Obama, would have a singular vantage point on the current Republican nominee’s mounting woes.

“When you’re inside a presidential campaign, it’s always important to keep perspective that the race is fundamentally a character test,” he tells me on a scratchy cell phone while driving through the mountains of Northern California. “Mitt Romney is being tested right now.”

David Corn, the liberal journalist who obtained the videotape of Mitt Romney’s damaging remarks at a closed-door fundraiser, says the unnamed source is a fan of his work.

“He’s told me he read my books and he was familiar with the earlier Bain stories that I had done, which were investigative, and he was impressed by that,” the Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones told me in a video interview. Corn is the author of such books as The Lies of George W. Bush.

Pressed about the source’s motivation, Corn, who is also an MSNBC commentator, says: “My guess is—I haven’t asked—is that he’s left of center.” Romney’s comments, that 47 percent of Americans are dependent on government, have an entitlement mentality and that he views them as victims—have erupted into the middle of the presidential campaign.

Jeffrey Goldberg, one of America’s most influential writers on the Middle East, reduced the initial reporting on the anti-Islam film that has angered many of that faith to a Twitter-length headline:

“A group of Christians, smearing Muslims, libels Jews.”

And he blames the media.

President Obama’s strategists are convinced that the overseas attacks on U.S. diplomats are a major break for his campaign—as long as they are not viewed as politicizing the crisis.

They are leaving the criticism of Mitt Romney’s late-night slam against the administration, before the deaths of four Americans in Libya were confirmed, to high-profile surrogates.

“I got the feeling that Romney didn’t have the facts and didn’t focus on the gravity of what he was saying,” former secretary of state Madeleine Albright said in an interview. “He just took a political shot without knowing what was going on.” Obama, says Albright, “knows how to deal with a crisis. I have a sense that Governor Romney doesn’t.”

Katie Couric got off to a bang-up start on her new daytime show by focusing on one of America’s favorite topics: herself.

Unfortunately, she then moved on to Jessica Simpson.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Jessica Simpson. But it came off as a typical celebrity interview.

When it comes to his city, Rahm Emanuel should be on the defensive.

The homicide rate in Chicago is up 15 percent. The teachers’ union is threatening a strike that would be crippling. But the mayor knows that, politically speaking, the best defense is a good offense.

“We have put more police on the street,” Emanuel says in a video interview. “We are forcefully trying to get guns, kids, and drugs off the streets … Overall crime in the city is down 9 percent this year.”

President Obama invoked FDR in making his case for a second term on Thursday night, replacing his hope-and-change mantra with a more sober challenge for a “harder” path to economic prosperity.

After stirring speeches by his wife and Bill Clinton, Obama faced a more daunting challenge in both rallying his base and spelling out why the next four years would be more successful than his difficult first term mired in economic malaise.

Bill Clinton, riding to the rescue of his Democratic successor, delivered an entertaining tour de force Wednesday night, saying the Republicans had created a “total mess” that Barack Obama is still cleaning up.

“If you want a you’re-on-your-own, winner-take-all society, you should support the Republican ticket,” Clinton said. “If you want a country of shared prosperity and shared responsibility—we’re-all-in-this-together society—you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.”

With one line, Clinton both acknowledged and neutralized Obama’s natural reserve, as a leader “who’s cool on the outside but who burns for America on the inside.”