Seven short days after a brimming and confident Barack Obama arrived in Denver for the presidential debate there is a stark new reality emerging from the boneyard of the president’s Mile High meltdown…in this decisive swing state that Democrats won going-away in 2008, the president finds himself trailing with just days before voting starts here.

From the Chicago Sun Times:

“Real Clear Politics tracking of the latest polls by non-campaign sources puts Romney ahead in Florida, 0.7; North Carolina, 3; Colorado, 0.5.

…Romney campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom was cautiously gleeful in an MSNBC interview. A week ago, when polls put Romney behind, stories were being written about how the Romney campaign was in disarray.

When “we were being questioned about the state of the race, and our advice was to simply caution everybody to be patient; that there’s going to be a lot of ups and downs in this campaign, but it’s going to be tight right until the end.”

If news of a breakthrough in pivotal states like Colorado is being met cautiously by the Romney camp, the same has got Obama’s base of national activists practically slitting their wrists.

From Politico this beautiful morning (and there’s a lot here, but read it…you’ll enjoy):

First came the nausea. Then came the anxiety.

After months of watching Mitt Romney twist in the media glare, a growing number of President Barack Obama’s supporters – though confined for now to a noisy minority of liberals – are peering into the Obama-might-actually-lose abyss for the first time after last week’s disastrous first debate.

…A handful of liberal pundits – amplifying the visceral reactions of the party’s liberal base to the debate and Obama’s subsequent dip in the polls – think the plane is plunging into a cliff. They have found their muse in Daily Beast columnist Andrew Sullivan, whom Obama reads regularly and was once invited to a White House state dinner.

“Did Obama just throw away the election?” Sullivan wrote in a widely read column posted Monday night, which drew 21,000 Facebook likes

….Neera Tanden, president of the liberal Center for American Progress and a 2008 Hillary Clinton adviser, challenged Sullivan and other like-minded liberals on Twitter, writing, “This freak-out is embarrassing.”

But another Clinton veteran, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg – who has long urged Obama to lay out a more specific agenda for his second term – sounded an alarm. He called the debate a “major turning point” in an interview with The Washington Post,especially among single women voters, a key swing demographic laser-focused on jobs and the economy…

…Back in 2008, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe had a word for doubters: “Bedwetters.”

Bedwetters? Ouch.

The fact of the matter is, there is a lot of time between now and the end of the election.

But thanks to a disastrous performance from Barack Obama under the glaring lights of the University of Denver seven days ago, there is no doubt which campaign is clinging to Big Mo.