Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney wanted to make one thing clear yesterday: He was the one under attack at Saturday night's debate at St. Anselm College, despite attempts by his opponents to paint him as the most negative candidate.

In an interview with ABC's George Stephanopolous yesterday, Romney said people will recognize that the attacks prove he is in a good position.

"And frankly, I think people who watch the debate had to say to themselves, 'What is it about these politicians that are more focused on insults than on issues?' " he said. "It's what's wrong with politics."

Romney said Washington lawmakers are unable to deal with challenges facing the country because they're too consumed with score-settling and attacking each other.

Who could Romney be talking about? An e-mail sent out by the campaign later in the morning provided a clue.

The e-mail included a link to a YouTube video of Sen. John McCain with a graph showing real-time viewer reactions to some of McCain's comments during the debate, which appeared to drop off when McCain went negative. It also mentions The New Republic's Noam Scheiber, who suggested there was too much Romney-bashing Saturday night.

"At certain moments it had the effect of making Romney look more sympathetic, at others it made him look like the only adult on stage, and at others it made him look like he must be the front-runner, since people were so determined to take him down a peg," Scheiber wrote on his blog. "McCain in particular seemed to go too far, looking and sounding downright snide at times."

• The blogosphere was rife with speculation yesterday about one of Sen. Barack Obama's New Hampshire campaign co-chairmen, Concord lobbyist Jim Demers, and what Obama said about him at Saturday night's debate. Demers came up - although not by name - when Sen. Hillary Clinton accused him of being a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry.

News reports said Obama "denied" the charge, but when the debate was replayed on New Hampshire Public Radio yesterday, Obama's response was inaudible, though he shook his head no and seemed to mouth the words "not true." The ABC transcript of the debate does not include a response from Obama.

According to the New Hampshire Secretary Of State's Office, Demers is registered to lobby for Pfizer and PhRMA.

"You can talk a great game about how you are really standing firm against the special interests, and then when it becomes inconvenient that you actually have a lobbyist running your campaign, you deny it," Clinton said yesterday morning.

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs told the Associated Press that Demers does not do business involving federal legislation or regulation. He said the campaign has drawn a distinction between lobbyists who are registered to work at the state level and those who lobby the federal government. "There is a difference between a college football player and professional football player," he said.

Another campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, said Obama "was shaking his head because her implication was that it violated our lobbyist pledge, and (Demers's) role quite clearly does not."

• John Edwards's campaign sent out an e-mail yesterday afternoon with a link to a blog post by Newsday's Glenn Thrush, who wrote about a moment in the debate when Clinton "got so worked up about Barack Obama she was practically bellowing." Edwards campaign strategist Joe Trippi told Thrush it reminded him of Howard Dean's infamous scream after the 2004 Iowa caucuses.

"No," Trippi said when asked if Clinton's "scream" was as bad as Dean's. Trippi was a Dean campaign adviser four years ago. "But it's about as close as you can get."

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