Face to face: Obama, Romney in crackling debate

Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Mitt Rom­ney and Pres­i­dent Barack Obama speak dur­ing the sec­ond pres­i­den­tial debate Tues­day at Hof­s­tra Uni­ver­sity in Hemp­stead, N.Y. (Asso­ci­ated Press | Eric Gay)

DAVID ESPO

STEVE PEOPLES

Asso­ci­ated Press

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. — An aggres­sive Pres­i­dent Barack Obama accused chal­lenger Mitt Rom­ney of favor­ing a “one-point plan” to help the rich in Amer­ica and play­ing pol­i­tics with the recent deadly ter­ror­ist attack in Libya in a Tues­day night debate crack­ling with energy and emo­tion just three weeks before the election.

Rom­ney pushed back hard, say­ing the mid­dle class “has been crushed over the last four years,” that 23 mil­lion Amer­i­cans are strug­gling to find work and that the death of the U.S. ambas­sador to Libya was part of an unrav­el­ing of the administration’s for­eign policy.

The pres­i­dent was feistier from the out­set than he had been in their ini­tial encounter two weeks ago, when he turned in a list­less per­for­mance that sent shud­ders through his sup­port­ers and helped fuel a rise by Rom­ney in opin­ion polls nation­ally and in some bat­tle­ground states.

Obama and Rom­ney dis­agreed, force­fully and repeat­edly — about taxes, mea­sures to reduce the deficit, energy, pay equity for women and health care as well as for­eign pol­icy across 90 min­utes of a town-hall style debate.

Immi­gra­tion prompted yet another clash, Rom­ney say­ing Obama had failed to pur­sue the com­pre­hen­sive leg­is­la­tion he promised at the dawn of his admin­is­tra­tion, and the pres­i­dent say­ing Repub­li­can obsti­nacy made a deal impossible.

Rom­ney gave as good as he got.

“You’ll get your chance in a moment. I’m still speak­ing,” the for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor said at one point while Obama was mid-sentence, draw­ing a gasp from the audi­ence. He said the president’s poli­cies had failed to jump­start the econ­omy and had cramped energy production.

The open-stage for­mat left the two men free to stroll freely across a red-carpeted stage, and they did. Their clashes crack­led with energy and ten­sion, and the crowd watched raptly as the two sparred while strug­gling to appear calm and affa­ble before a national tele­vi­sion audience.

While most of the debate was focused on pol­icy dif­fer­ences, there was one more-personal moment, when Obama said Rom­ney had invest­ments in China.

“Mr. Pres­i­dent, have you looked at your pen­sion?” Rom­ney interrupted.

“You know, I don’t look at my pen­sion. It’s not as big as yours,” shot back Obama to his wealth­ier rival.

Under the for­mat agreed to in advance, mem­bers of an audi­ence of 82 uncom­mit­ted vot­ers posed ques­tions to the pres­i­dent and his challenger.

Nearly all of them con­cerned domes­tic pol­icy until one raised the sub­ject of the recent death of the U.S. ambas­sador to Libya in a ter­ror­ist attack at an Amer­i­can post in Beng­hazi. Rom­ney said it took Obama a long time to admit the episode had been a ter­ror­ist attack, but Obama said he had said so the day after in an appear­ance in the Rose Gar­den out­side the White House.

When mod­er­a­tor Candy Crow­ley of CNN said the pres­i­dent had in fact done so, Obama, prompted, “Say that a lit­tle louder, Candy.”

Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Clin­ton has taken respon­si­bil­ity for the death of Ambas­sador L. Christo­pher Stevens and three other Amer­i­cans, but Obama said bluntly, “I’m the pres­i­dent, and I’m always responsible.”

Rom­ney said it was “trou­bling” that Obama con­tin­ued with a cam­paign event in Las Vegas on the day after the attack in Libya, an event the Repub­li­can said had “sym­bolic sig­nif­i­cance and per­haps even mate­r­ial significance.”

Obama seemed to bris­tle. He said it was offen­sive for any­one to allege that he or any­one in his admin­is­tra­tion had used the inci­dent for polit­i­cal pur­poses. “That’s not what I do.”

One intense exchange focused on com­pet­ing claims about whether energy pro­duc­tion is increas­ing or slow­ing. Obama accused Rom­ney of mis­rep­re­sent­ing what has hap­pened — a theme he returned to time and again. Rom­ney strode across the stage to con­front Obama face to face, just feet from the audience.

Both men pledged a bet­ter eco­nomic future to a young man who asked the first ques­tion, a mem­ber of a pre-selected audi­ence of 82 uncom­mit­ted voters.

Then the president’s deter­mi­na­tion to show a more aggres­sive side became evident.

Rebut­ting his rival’s claim to a five-point plan to cre­ate 12 mil­lion jobs, Obama said, “Gov. Rom­ney says he’s got a five-point plan. Gov. Rom­ney doesn’t have a five-point plan. He has a one-point plan. And that plan is to make sure that folks at the top play by a dif­fer­ent set of rules.”

“That’s been his phi­los­o­phy in the pri­vate sec­tor,” Obama said of his rival. “That’s been his phi­los­o­phy as gov­er­nor. That’s been his phi­los­o­phy as a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date. You can make a lot of money and pay lower tax rates than some­body who makes a lot less.”

“You can ship jobs over­seas and get tax breaks for it. You can invest in a coun­try, bank­rupt it, lay off the work­ers, strip away their pen­sions and you still make money. That’s exactly the phi­los­o­phy that we’ve seen in place for the last decade,” the pres­i­dent said in a scorch­ing summation.

Unable to respond at length because of the debate’s rules, Rom­ney said the accu­sa­tions were “way off the mark.”

But moments later, he reminded the national tele­vi­sion audi­ence of the nation’s painfully slow recov­ery from the worst reces­sion in decades.

There are “23 mil­lion peo­ple strug­gling to find a job. … The president’s poli­cies have been exer­cised over the last four years and they haven’t put Amer­ica back to work,” he said. “We have fewer peo­ple work­ing today than when he took office.”

Eco­nomic growth has been slow through­out Obama’s term in office, and unem­ploy­ment only recently dipped below 8 per­cent for the first time since he moved into the White House. Rom­ney noted that if out-of-work Amer­i­cans who no longer look for jobs were counted, the unem­ploy­ment rate would be 10.7 percent.

Both men had rehearsed exten­sively for the encounter, a turn­about for Obama.

“I had a bad night,” the pres­i­dent con­ceded, days after he and Rom­ney shared a stage for the first time, in Den­ver. His aides made it known he didn’t intend to be as def­er­en­tial to his chal­lenger this time, and the pres­i­den­tial party decamped for a resort in Williams­burg, Va., for rehearsals that con­sumed the bet­ter part of three days.

Rom­ney rehearsed in Mass­a­chu­setts and again after arriv­ing on Long Island on debate day, with less to make up for.

Asked Tues­day night by one mem­ber of the audi­ence how he would dif­fer from for­mer Pres­i­dent George W. Bush, the last Repub­li­can to hold the office, Rom­ney said, “We are dif­fer­ent peo­ple and these are dif­fer­ent times.”

He said he would attempt to bal­ance the bud­get, some­thing Bush was unsuc­cess­ful in doing, get tougher on China and work more aggres­sively to expand trade.

Obama jumped in with his own pre­dic­tions — not nearly as favor­able to the man a few feet away on stage. He said the for­mer pres­i­dent didn’t attempt to cut off fed­eral fund­ing for Planned Par­ent­hood or turn Medicare into a voucher system.

Though the ques­tions were from unde­cided vot­ers inside the hall — in a deeply Demo­c­ra­tic state — the audi­ence that mat­tered most watched on tele­vi­sion and was counted in the tens of mil­lions. Cru­cially impor­tant: view­ers in the nine bat­tle­grounds where the race is likely to be settled.

The final debate, next Mon­day in Florida, will be devoted to for­eign policy.

Opin­ion polls made the race a close one, with Obama lead­ing in some national sur­veys and Rom­ney in oth­ers. Despite the Republican’s clear gains in sur­veys in recent days, the pres­i­dent led in sev­eral polls of Wis­con­sin and Ohio, two key Mid­west­ern bat­tle­grounds where Rom­ney and run­ning mate Paul Ryan are cam­paign­ing heavily.

Bar­ring a last-minute shift in the cam­paign, Obama is on course to win states and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia that account for 237 of the 270 elec­toral votes needed for vic­tory. The same is true for Rom­ney in states with 191 elec­toral votes.

The remain­ing 110 elec­toral votes are divided among the hotly con­tested bat­tle­ground states of Florida (29), North Car­olina (15), Vir­ginia (13) New Hamp­shire (4), Iowa (6), Col­orado (9), Nevada (6), Ohio (18) and Wis­con­sin (10).

Obama has cam­paigned in the past sev­eral days by accus­ing Rom­ney of run­ning away from some of the con­ser­v­a­tive posi­tions he took for tax cuts and against abor­tion ear­lier in the year when he was try­ing to win the Repub­li­can nomination.

“Maybe you’re won­der­ing what to believe about Mitt Rom­ney,” says one ad, designed to remind vot­ers of the Republican’s strong oppo­si­tion to abor­tion except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at stake.

Rom­ney coun­tered by stress­ing both in per­son and through his tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ing the slow pace of the eco­nomic recov­ery, which has left growth slug­gish and unem­ploy­ment high through­out Obama’s term. Job­less­ness recently declined to 7.8 per­cent, drop­ping below 8 per­cent for the first time since the pres­i­dent took office.

Posted by AP News on Oct 16 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.