Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said today on “Face the Nation” that the President was “taken aback by the brazenness” of Mitt Romney’s lies during the first debate.

CBS’s “Face the Nation” host Bob Schieffer kicked off the conversation “with the obvious question — what happened?”

“The president showed up with the intent of answering questions and having a discussion, an honest discussion of where we will go as a country, and Romney showed up to deliver a performance, and he delivered a very good performance,” Axelrod said. “It was completely un-rooted in fact, it was completely un-rooted in the positions he’s taken before and he spent 90 minutes trying to undo two years of campaigning on that stage, but he did it very well.”

Schieffer followed up by asking if he was saying Romney “lied or was dishonest?”

“Well, yeah, I think he was dishonest,” Axelrod said.

“I’m saying he was dishonest in his answers, you can characterize that any way you want,” Axelrod later added. …

Obama, Axelrod said, “was a little taken aback by the brazenness with which Gov. Romney walked away” from his past positions and his record.

“That’s something we’re going to have to make an adjustment for in these subsequent debates,” Axelrod said.