Fox News has one of Mitt Romney’s better moment of the debate last night, although Romney certainly had a number of good responses in the townhall debate.  Barack Obama had attacked Romney’s tax plan as a $5 trillion tax hike, a figure that even his deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter admitted a couple of weeks ago was false.  Romney defended his plan by going on offense, asking the audience whether a President who ran trillion-dollar-plus deficits each of his four year in office has any business talking about plans “not adding up”:

Mitt Romney took on President Obama on the issue of balancing the budget, saying that he has the experience needed to correct failed policies of the current administration.

“I was someone who ran businesses for 25 years and balanced the budget … I ran the Olympics and balanced the budget … I ran the state of Massachusetts […] and balanced the budget,” he said, adding, “If we’re talking about math that doesn’t add up, how about $4 trillion in deficits over the past four years, $5 trillion … that’s math that doesn’t add up.”

I’ve been waiting for this counterattack for some time. It takes a lot of chutzpah for a President who rang up nearly $5 trillion in deficits to claim that their analysis of an opponent’s tax plan has some hidden insight into irresponsibility. This gets back to my argument earlier that Obama is still running a campaign that believes it can run solely as the anti-Romney. That strategy no longer “adds up” after the first debate, but Team Obama doesn’t seem to have gotten the message.