Seven minutes into the first presidential debate, the mood turned from tense to grim inside the room at the University of Denver where Obama staff members were following the encounter. Top aides monitoring focus groups — voters who registered their minute-by-minute reactions with the turn of a dial — watched as enthusiasm for Mitt Romney spiked. "We are getting bombed on Twitter," announced Stephanie Cutter, a deputy campaign manager, while tracking the early postings by political analysts and journalists whom the Obama campaign viewed as critical in setting debate perceptions.
By the time President Obama had waded through a convoluted answer about health care — "He's not mentioning voucher-care?" someone called out — a pall had fallen over the room. When the president closed by declaring, "This was a terrific debate," his re-election team grimaced. There was the obligatory huddle to discuss how to explain his performance to the nation, and then a moment of paralysis: No one wanted to go to the spin room and speak with reporters.
Mr. Romney's advisers monitored the debate up the hall from the Obama team, as well as at campaign headquarters in Boston. Giddy smiles flashed across their faces as their focus groups showed the same results.
"Boy, the president is off tonight," said Stuart Stevens, the senior Romney strategist, sounding mystified, according to aides in the room. Russ Schriefer, a senior adviser, immediately began planning television spots based entirely on clips from the debate. As it drew to a close, Gail Gitcho, Mr. Romney's communications director in Boston, warned surrogates heading out to television studios: "No chest thumping."
The Oct. 3 debate sharply exposed Mr. Obama's vulnerabilities and forced the president and his advisers to work to reclaim the campaign over a grueling 30 days, ending with his triumph on Tuesday. After a summer of growing confidence, Mr. Obama suddenly confronted the possibility of a loss that would diminish his legacy and threaten his signature achievement, the health care law. He emerged newly combative, newly contrite and newly willing to recognize how his disdain for Mr. Romney had blinded him to his opponent's strengths and ability to inflict damage.
After watching a videotape of his debate performance, Mr. Obama began calling panicked donors and supporters to reassure them he would do better. "This is on me," the president said, again and again.
Mr. Obama, who had dismissed warnings about being caught off guard in the debate, told his advisers that he would now accept and deploy the prewritten attack lines that he had sniffed at earlier. "If I give up a couple of points of likability and come across as snarky, so be it," Mr. Obama told his staff.
As his campaign began an all-out assault on Mr. Romney's credibility and conservative views, the president soon was denouncing Mr. Romney's budget proposals as a "sketchy deal" and charging that the Republican nominee was not telling Americans the truth.
Mr. Obama recognized that to a certain extent, he had walked into a trap that Mr. Romney's advisers had anticipated: His antipathy toward Mr. Romney — which advisers described as deeper than what Mr. Obama had felt for John McCain in 2008 — led the incumbent to underestimate his opponent as he began moving to the center before the debate audience of millions of television viewers.
But as concerned as the White House was during the last 30 days of the campaign, its polls never showed Mr. Obama slipping behind Mr. Romney, aides said. The president was helped in no small part by the tremendous amount of money the campaign built up, which had permitted him to pound his Republican rival before he had ever had a chance to fully introduce himself to the nation.
That was just one of several ways that Mr. Obama's campaign operations, some unnoticed by Mr. Romney's aides in Boston, helped save the president's candidacy. In Chicago, the campaign recruited a team of behavioral scientists to build an extraordinarily sophisticated database packed with names of millions of undecided voters and potential supporters. The ever-expanding list let the campaign find and register new voters who fit the demographic pattern of Obama backers and methodically track their views through thousands of telephone calls every night.
rest http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/us/politics/obama-campaign-clawed-back-after-a-dismal-debate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
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