Both candidates came equipped with their boxing gloves to Tuesday’s presidential debate, but it was Mitt Romney who took it too far, according to Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough.
Scarborough said Romney “came on way too strong” toward the “female moderator,” CNN’s Candy Crowley, as well as a sitting president.
“If you’re going to run for president of the United States, there are two things you don’t do in debates,” Scarborough explained. “One, you don’t run over a female moderator. You just don’t. Stylistically you don’t. It’s very dangerous. Jim Lehrer? Fine, you can get out a knife and have a knife fight with Jim Lehrer, but you don’t do that with a female moderator. It’s problematic.”
Jim Lehrer moderated the first presidential debate on Oct. 3 in Denver.
The msnbc host also said Romney’s aggressive posturing toward the president could alienate independent voters.
“[As a challenger], you don’t run over the president, whether that president is a Republican or whether that president is a Democrat,” Scarborough said. “There are independent voters who believe that a president should be treated with deference because he is the commander-in-chief.”
“The Mitt Romney that we saw yesterday was the Mitt Romney who was very successful in cutting off Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry and Herman Cain when the stakes were far lower,” he continued. “It took him about 20 minutes to figure out he just couldn’t be that much of a bulldozer.”
Political journalists, observers, and msnbc analysts John Heilemann and Mark Halperin also joined the Morning Joe panel Wednesday and said the president mostly held the upper hand on Tuesday.
“This debate was, I thought, the mirror image of Denver,” said Heilemann, New York Magazine’s national affairs editor. “In Denver, Mitt Romney had a plan, a strategy, he executed it. President Obama didn’t have those things.”








