Mitt Romney is the only adult in the room

After Rick Perry's abysmal debate and Herman Cain's transparently false sexual harassment defense, it's more clear than ever that Romney's the one

Six weeks ago, I wrote that in the GOP race for the presidential nomination, Mitt Romney's the one — mostly because the other candidates have proved to be implausible or utterly inconceivable. And after Wednesday's Michigan debate, we now know with even more certainty who the Republican nominee will be. His name is not Rick Perry, whose potential comeback imploded in an excruciating, alternately comical and pathetic 50 seconds that left an indelible impression of someone out of his depth — and all but out of the race.

A few million people watched the debate; perhaps 50 million had seen the excruciating 50 seconds by the next day. Perry, who initially led the race when he entered as the true conservative alternative to Romney, has biffed, farbled, and gaffed his way into the now inescapable status of an also-ran. It's over. When Perry was on that stage in Michigan, I was in a room with top Republican pros. One of them read a tweet out loud: "Campaign office furniture in Austin, Texas, now available on Craigslist."

Debates matter; they are often decisive, a truth Perry ignored as he decided to announce, but didn't prepare himself to run — and a truth Romney learned the hard way in his losing 1994 Senate campaign against Ted Kennedy. Perry's decline and fall has been so startling — and Tim Pawlenty's so swift when he refused in a New Hampshire forum to repeat to Romney's face a criticism he'd peddled on television just the day before — that there's a gathering consensus that debates are more critical this year than ever before.

Romney looks like a president. He more than anyone else commands the stage; in this field, he looks like the one who could go up against Obama.

At best, that's half right. The instant analysis of the mainstream media, with a few exceptions, used to be metronomically balanced; the voters made a judgment, but the press was reluctant to rush to judgment, preferring to wait for the next set of polls, or hedging any verdict with ritualistic qualifiers. What's different this year is social media, which does not wait and which has pushed tradition outlets to keep pace. But the reality of debates as game changers is as old as the 1960 clash between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

In Chris Matthews' lyrical new book Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero — which draws you into the character of that extraordinary man and time so you almost feel you are there — there is a riveting account of the first televised presidential debate in American history. Kennedy drilled, lying on a "bed in his hotel room, clutching a fistful of cards in his hand… After each card has been dealt with, Kennedy would throw it on the floor." He met Dan Hewitt, the CBS producer who would later create 60 Minutes, a week before the debate in "a hanger at Chicago's Midway Airport" to learn about the staging and stagecraft of the encounter. "Kennedy took the thing much more seriously than Nixon," Hewitt said. Kennedy prepared; Nixon showed up. And that was the making of the president in 1960.

Ever since, debates have turned tides — in general elections and primaries alike. Thus in 1976, Gerald Ford rhetorically freed Poland from Communist domination — and lost the White House. Four years later, after strategically using his debate with Jimmy Carter to reassure Americans of his commitment to nuclear arms control, Ronald Reagan closed the deal as he rebuked Carter: "There you go again."

In 1992, the first George Bush blew his diminishing prospects for re-election when he impatiently glanced at his watch; in 2000, Al Gore was branded a loser for sighing during his confrontation with the second Bush — which Gore otherwise clearly won. And in 2004, John Kerry asked a devastating question in an Iowa debate: "Governor Dean, you recently said that you wouldn't presume that Osama Bin Laden was guilty for 9/11. What in the world were you thinking?" There was no good answer. The press barely noticed the exchange; but for Iowa Democrats, it crystallized the race. They wanted someone who had a real chance to beat Bush — and it wasn't a candidate who'd said something like that.

I doubt Perry knows that history, and it's probably too late for him to read Matthews' book. He's either treated the debates as a drop-by or he's incapable of getting ready — which means he's not ready to take on Barack Obama or to grapple with the demanding decision-making of the presidency.