Last night’s final presidential debate was “the best of Obama’s three,” John Heilemann concluded on today’s Morning Joe. Increasing Romney momentum forced the president to go on the offensive, Heilemann said, “indulging in zingers” to cast his opponent as a relic of eighties foreign policy. While Obama’s “Battleship” remark carried a smack of derision, Heilemann notes the seated format avoided the distracting and somewhat aggressive physicality of the second debate. The verbal sparring was grounded in strategy and substance, and left Romney “tentative, weak, and nervous” in the first half. Overall, Romney’s base message failed to move past “I agree with [the president] on everything in terms of policy, I would just execute the policy better,” Heilemann said.
