Bachmann Is 'Done. Fini. Kaput.'

If the fat lady didn’t quite sing for Michele Bachmann at last night’s debate, she at least hummed a few notes, say the critics:

• It was “remarkable” to see this once-top-tier candidate “relegated to an afterthought, getting barely as much face time as Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich,” writes Michael A. Memoli in the Los Angeles Times. Rick Perry has indeed “taken the oxygen out of Bachmann’s campaign.”
• “Hate to agree with the conventional wisdom, but unless something torpedoes Perry, she's no longer a factor in the race,” concludes David Weigel on Slate. “The mannered efforts to pretend that some congressional battles have given her all the experience she needs to serve are just unbearably weak with three governors onstage.”

• Ezra Klein sums it up in the Washington Post: “Mitt Romney looked like he had already won the Republican nomination. Rick Perry looked like he will win the Republican nomination. Michele Bachmann looked like she was beginning to realize she definitely wouldn’t win the Republican nomination.”
• In the International Business Times, John Talty declares that last night’s debate “definitively” turned the contest into a race between Romney and Perry. Bachmann is “done. Fini. Kaput.” Unless, of course, someone taps her as VP—at this point that’s her “only nomination chance.”