'Friday Night Lights' Author and Lifelong Dem Dumps Obama for Romney

Buzz Bissinger knows sports.

The author of “Friday Night Lights” and lifelong Democrat isn’t a political pundit by trade, but he felt so strongly about the fallout from the first presidential debate that he took to the cyber-pages of The Daily Beast to share his impressions.

Long story short – Bissinger is now on Team Mitt.

This is not a frivolous decision, nor is it an easy one. I grew up on the Upper West Side of New York, arguably the country’s nexus of liberalogy, where it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least as a child to discover that my parents, along with all the other attendees in some garret reminiscent of the French Resistance, had thrown eggs at Abbie Hoffman at a political get-together because he wasn’t liberal enough….

I have never seen a performance worse than Obama’s, distracted, his head dipped into the podium as if avoiding the smell of something rotten, acting above the very idea that a debate does provide a pivotal referendum on his first term as it has for all incumbent presidents, whipsawed by the legion of usual advisers telling him to play defense when his own intuition should have told him that he needed to go on the offensive as Romney slapped him around.

But there was more than the entitlement of entitlement. He struck me as burnt out, tired of selling his message although he has always been terrible at selling his message when it veers from idealism into the practical.