One-third of the way through the debate, and my initial impression: everyone on Twitter (and from I hear, in general media) is frickin’ insane.

Someone else made the Etch-a-Sketch comment before I got to it (Chris Matthews? don’t know, quoting Twitter), but Romney goes beyond that: this is Pod Person territory in the first 30 minutes. I’m halfway expecting him to promise everyone a pony.

Here’s the thing: I’m watching Romney and I’m finding what he’s saying to be literally incredible—it’s completely at odds with everything else he’s said before. It’s not winning any points with me, but it’s not supposed to; there’s nothing he could say that would switch me to being a Romney supporter.

But that’s precisely the question. All of the people saying that he’s hit it out of the park are presuming that a) he’s pitching to the undecided voter, and b) that these people are tabula rasa waiting for Romney to create a first impression. I don’t buy that. They might be disinterested, and they might be uninformed, but they show up tonight with a standing level of trust or distrust in both Obama and Romney. And if they’ve never heard of either of these guys, then that standing level of trust is going to be their general impression of politicians.

So if you want to make the case that Romney’s argument is winning him votes, then you have to presume that the undecided, uninformed voter is going to spontaneously trust him here. And I don’t buy that that’s happening: because he’s a politician, because he’s wealthy beyond the dreams of most people, and at least in part because he’s talking out of an orifice that’s pointed in a completely different direction than it has been since 2008.

We tend to assumed that uninformed, undecided people are stupid and that they have no prior knowledge. Not true. And not buying that this is a Romney win in any way that matters. If Romney went into the debate with more generally positive numbers about how he’s viewed personally, I’d be saying something different.