Comin' Out Swinging: Thoughts on Joe Biden's Approach vs. Paul Ryan

Much like the man in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” who protests that he is, in fact, not dead yet, reports of Mitt Romney’s demise were “greatly exaggerated” before last week’s first Presidential Debate with incumbent Barack Obama. He ended up winning in the eyes of many in the debate, and the poll numbers since then have shown that result has really turned the race around. According to Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com blog, Obama’s chances of winning the election have dropped from 87.1% on October 4^th to 66.1% as of Thursday. Granted, this still gives him a two-thirds majority to win, but with polls showing Florida and Colorado starting to swing toward Romney, that percentage could decline further.

Obama vs. Romney: The Good, The Bad, and the Debate Over Victory

If you’ve been following news coverage over the past few weeks of the Presidential election, there are a couple of things that you certainly would have noticed. The first of those is that President Barack Obama is pulling ahead in the polls in several key swing states, including Ohio and Florida. In fact, Nate Silver’s blog has given him about an 85% chance of winning the election according to a summation of all the polling data available, so things were starting to look bleak for the president’s Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

Just as emphasized as the widening gap between the two candidates was the narrative spun by both sides in attempting to paint themselves as the underdogs in the Presidential Debates, which began on Wednesday night in Colorado. The Romney campaign released a memo asserting that the president would focus on undermining his challenger rather than presenting a clear set of objectives for his second term in office, while Obama and crew said that he didn’t consider himself the front runner and that he expected Romney to win. This posturing definitely resembled that of any major sporting event, where both teams are trying to grab the underdog mantel and run with it so that they have that motivating factor behind them as they attempt to get psyched up for a game.