Desperate president launches zingers and not much else.

[BritishSword]

Taken from the Boston Herald

President Obama won the staring contest, but he didn’t win the debate, and that means trouble for his re-election hopes.

Obama, needing a big night to revive his flatlining campaign, sneered and scoffed at Mitt Romney all night but couldn’t deliver the knockout blow that would stop the GOP nominee’s momentum. Romney looked more like the front-runner and Obama looked more like a worried incumbent.

The president’s snarky one-liners — such as lecturing Romney that “we have these things called aircraft carriers” — may have alienated some voters and will definitely fire up Republicans.

It was a risky strategy for the incumbent and showed what kind of trouble Obama finds himself in just two weeks before Election Day.

But the former Massachusetts governor repeatedly refused to return Obama’s attacks or get rattled — a smart move designed to assure independent voters that he would not be a war mongering commander-in-chief.

“We can’t kill our way out of this mess,” Romney said of the troubles in the Middle East, a line you might expect more from a liberal Democrat than a conservative.

But while Romney often ended up agreeing with Obama on foreign policy, he also managed to land some effective blows.

After Obama claimed GOP charges that the president went on an “apology tour” after being elected was “the biggest whopper that’s been told in this campaign,” Romney fired back.

“Mr. President, America has not dictated to other nations,” Romney said. “We have freed other nations from dictators.”

Obama’s strategy of glaring at Romney all night was designed to rattle the Republican nominee and force him into a mistake that could have dominated the last few weeks.

But Romney didn’t take the bait, even passing on a chance to return to the argument over the terror attacks in Libya. For much of the 90-minute debate, Romney was the one who stayed cool and looked presidential.

If this final debate was about who gave the best zingers, Obama clearly won. But it’s doubtful most undecided voters are impressed by one-liners. The president looked angry at times, and one point sought to brush off Romney for thinking the nation’s defense was “a game of Battleship.”

At another point, Obama mocked the former Massachusetts governor for saying that Russia was the biggest geopolitical threat.

“The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” he said dismissively.

The foreign policy debate was once considered Obama’s ace in the hole, but the terror attacks in Libya — and the administration’s faltering response — have changed that.