In a conversation over at Daily Intel, Jim Fallows and Josh Barro consider the importance of the debates. Barrow expects them to be "uneventful" since Romney and Obama share "defensive debating styles":
Their strength in debates is mostly about not making mistakes, rather than landing grand knockout punches. I can't remember anything Barack Obama said in the debates in 2008, primary or general. Romney did have a couple of memorable moments in the primaries — "helping" Rick Perry remember the names of cabinet departments, listing the shifting set of pork-barrel panders that Newt Gingrich would tout depending on which state he was in. But that was sort of shooting fish in a barrel.
Fallows believes that "among the various elements that go into effective political performance" debates are "by far the area of Romney's greatest skill." Obama's debating abilities, on the other hand, are not his strongpoint, says Fallows:
[W]ithout going into all the details, it strikes me that debating is near the lower end of Obama's range of performance skills. Very effective set-piece orator, usually effective at press conferences and so on. But at least against Hillary Clinton, not really that memorably effective. So we have the high end of Romney's skills and the low-average range of Obama's.
The Dish 