Mort Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of US News And World Report,  said: “…there is no doubt that President Barack Obama clearly lost the debate this week, as a matter of both substance and tone. Take your pick from the river of insults: listless, meandering, lazy, dull-brained, long-winded, languid, and flaccid were just some of the epithets from the pundits. Even the New York Times opined that ‘He lost his competitive edge.’ The worst that Mitt Romney’s relatively few critics could come up with was that his tax cut was unaffordable. All Obama could do was repeat the charge, and Romney was able to make the pledge that he would not reduce revenues through his tax cut because they would be offset by the elimination of special write-offs and loopholes…. But what is at issue isn’t debating style, questions of posture and demeanor, ‘gotcha moments,’ or ‘You’re no Jack Kennedy’ zingers. The fundamental issue for America is that we seem to have lost our way and we haven’t found it after four years of the Obama administration, thanks to a leadership so lacking that the American dream now seems to be a chimera of nostalgia. The president appears to have lost his intellectual interest.  It is all very well to raise a sword and cry “Forward!” but to what? Campaigning and barnstorming, at which Obama is very good, is no substitute for brainstorming to evolve a cohesive set of plans to deal with the current crisis.”  http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2012/10/05/mort-zuckerman-why-the-country-is-unhappy-under-obama_print.html

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason describes Obama’s “new look” after losing stature during the first presidential election debate with Mitt Romney on October 3:  http://reason.com/blog/2012/10/06/politico-obama-is-risen-truly-he-is-rise – based on a Politico article by Glen Thrush on the Obama “reset” http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=2F7BFDF4-1A05-4051-8715-EB126ED48AAD\

Cavanaugh says of the Politico article: “…the piece is one of the greatest works of unintentional (and uncomfortable) comedy since David Brooks got hot and bothered over the crease in the future president’s pants, Chris Matthews objectively felt a thrill up his leg at the 2008 Democratic candidate’s silky tones, or The New York Times tried to give an inspirational glow to President Obama’s tardy and clumsy sellout of longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak….. The saddest thing is this description of how the president laid out his bold new game plan:

[Thrush writes:]” He huddled with his inner circle — David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Valerie Jarrett, Anita Dunn, Ron Klain and Jim Messina — and settled on the theme they hammered all of Thursday — a direct attack on Romney that accused him of out-and-out lying on his tax-cut claims and portrayed the former Massachusetts governor as a two-faced imposter willing to say anything to win.

“First of all, hasn’t Anita Dunn been gone from the Obama administration since, like, sometime during the Carter administration? That she’s back is almost as ominous as the continued presence of Plouffe, Jarrett and the rest. Obama’s problem is not stylistic. It’s a disastrous presidency in which all of these knuckleheads are directly implicated. This is a reset? “

And this is what Obama is doing to overcome the deficiency of his performance at the first debate? This is how he picks himself up and goes back into the fight for the leadership of the free world?

Let us, as Obama likes to say, be clear: After the Libya consulate attack September 11, on the morning after the Libyan ambassador was killed, Obama flew to Vegas for a fundraiser. After the UN opened its summit September 23 to welcome the leaders of the Mideast countries, all of whom wanted to speak to Obama, he left Hilary to handle it while he flew to California with his wife to sit on a couch with Whoopee Goldberg and be, in his own words, “eye candy”. He loses his first presidential debate of the election on substance, and his first instinct is to blame the other guy for lying about the facts, as if no one noticed that he himself had none to offer in response nor did he pinpoint a single inaccuracy during the debate.

Doesn’t anyone on the left see that maybe the rest of us have the right to be outraged that Obama is utterly derelict in his oath of office to carry out his responsibilities as President, choosing instead to stroke the egos of campaign donors and of elite overpaid women with nothing better to do than congratulate one another on how catty they can be about the decent men and women in the opposition, who are watching with the rest of their fellow citizens as the country free-falls into chaos and the global crises that require the US to mitigate them now threaten to set back peace negotiations for a generation or more?

At the 2011 UN summit, Obama met the leaders of Afghanistan, Brazil, France, Israel, Japan, Libya, the Palestinian Authority, South Sudan, Turkey and the United Kingdom as well as the UN Libya Contact Group, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and UN General Assembly president Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser.

At the 2012 UN summit, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, found himself struggling to explain why Obama had gone from 13 meetings last year to zero this year. He said, ‘It is a simple fact that when you’re president of the United States, your responsibility as commander-in-chief never ends and you are constantly engaged in matters of foreign affairs and national security. And that’s what this president is doing.’  Sure he is. And Whoopee Goldberg is his Henry Kissinger.

This is supposed to be the smartest president the US has ever had. Instead of seeing the debate as a wake-up call, instead of seeing that he doesn’t have the facts he needs to defend his positions and he doesn’t have a credible plan to fix the economy, that if he wants to be re-elected he has an obligation to the voters to tell them why he deserves a second term, defend his record and promise something actually doable – instead, he huddles with his advisers for a whole day and the blindingly inventive plan these erudite strategists come up with is to call his opponent a liar? That’s the best he can do? And that is supposed to convince everybody he deserves four more years to fix the mess he inherited and the accumulated debris he has piled on top of it?

This suit is empty.