Nationally televised debates of US presidential candidates are usually boring stalemates - but not always. Former US president John F. Kennedy famously looked cooler and more presidential than his rival Richard Nixon in their 1960 debates, which proved crucial in one of the closest results in US election history. Another former US president Jimmy Carter lost big to Ronald Reagan in 1980 and former US vice-president Al Gore's supercilious sighs clearly tilted support to former US president George W. Bush in 2000 when the latter needed it most.

US President Barack Obama's tired, lackluster performance in this year's first presidential debate with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney may prove an equally important turning point in history.

Over the previous month, Romney appeared determined to throw away a campaign he had previously had an excellent chance of winning. His speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, didn't give him boost or bounce at all in the opinion polls.

His running Republican mate Paul Ryan had turned out to be a weight dragging him down. Ryan, a hard-line right-wing, minimum government ideologue, could not even deliver a lead for Romney in his home state of Wisconsin. Then he was booed for an hour by the audience at an American Association of Retired Persons conference. Since then, Romney's campaign managers have kept Ryan carefully muzzled.

The publicizing of Romney's notorious remarks last year writing off 47 percent of Americans as government-dependent parasites looked like being a fatal blow to his hopes.

But now, after 90 minutes of televised arguments in Denver watched by an estimated 50 million people, Romney's campaign has been reborn. He successfully re-branded himself as a relative moderate, though he gave no further details on his deliberately vague economic proposals. He promised to create 12 million new jobs. But he didn't give a hint how.

Yet Romney reversed his long weeks of slide and bumbles. He was energetic and aggressive. By contrast, Obama appeared listless, tired and unfocused.

Romney's policy recommendations remained as vague and unfocused as ever. But an immediate post-debate poll of 500 undecided voters by CBS News suggested he had definitely won the debate and vastly increased the favorable perception of him.

Now Romney's genuinely impressive performance is starting to boost his poll ratings. It remains to be seen if it will give him specific significant boosts in the nine crucial battleground states that will decide the outcome of this election in the Electoral College. But after weeks of throwing away a race, he now has some real hope to reverse a month of negative trends.

The debate was certainly a blow on the chin for the Democratic national campaign, but far from a fatal reversal. One of the greatest strengths the Democrats have had so far is far more effective and focused television ads. Now their challenge is going to try and use that expertise to undercut and stop the favorable perception Romney finally succeeded in projecting to the American people.

Romney's campaign, it must be noted, remains seriously flawed. His budgetary numbers still don't add up. It is devastating that former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker and 1990s Third Party presidential candidate H. Ross Perot have both refused to endorse him as the candidate of budgetary responsibility. Both men are lifelong champions of big business and fiscal probity. It is true that neither of them was going to endorse Obama after he added more than $5 trillion to the US national government debt in less than four years in office. But it is also true that neither of them will touch Romney, who has ruled out any tax increase and is still almost certain to approve a huge tax cut for the wealthiest Americans if he should win power.

Romney's campaign manager Stuart Stevens has proven an increasing embarrassment. Romney has been campaigning on his unquestioned business success at building up Bain Capital from scratch into a $65 billion financial behemoth. He claims to be a brilliant business manager. But the ability to choose first class managers is essential to any success both in business and government. Yet Romney's two most important personnel selections, running mate Ryan and campaign manager Stevens have proven to be not good ideas.

Also, Romney's ignorance of the wider world and his weird ability to outrage even such natural allies as the traditionally pro-American prime minister of Britain and the mayor of London throw further major doubts on his ability to successfully lead the United States in a rapidly changing, complex world.

Romney has shown that he can raise his game and look impressive against Obama - no small feat in itself. If Obama can raise his own energy levels and tear into Romney in the next two debates, he can still reverse the damage. A mildly reviving economy is also on his side.

But Romney, an ideological extremist once again posing as a moderate, is now back in the race.

The author is chief global analyst of The Globalist, a political columnist for the Baltimore Post-Examiner, and former chief foreign correspondent for The Washington Times.

(China Daily 10/11/2012 page9)