Back in the game

Obama’s aggressive performance against Mitt Romney has restored his lead but, with just three weeks to the election, it will go down to the wire, writes Andy Sullivan

PRESIDENT Barack Obama has put his re-election bid back on firm footing with a strong debate performance that thrilled his Democratic supporters and earned him a second look from the few voters who remain undecided.

With just three weeks to the Nov 6 election, Obama’s second of three debates with Republican rival Mitt Romney represented one of their final chances to make an impression with voters.

Obama made the most of it with a focused, aggressive effort. It was a sharp departure from his listless first debate two weeks ago, when Romney’s dominant showing ignited a resurgence by the Republican that left the race virtually even before Tuesday’s meeting.

“Game on — he’s back,” said political science professor Steven Schier.

Obama made sure to work in all of the attack lines he had neglected in the Oct 3 debate. He hammered Romney for the wealthy Republican’s low personal income tax rate and Romney’s now infamous dismissal of “47%” of the electorate, as seen in a secretly-recorded video of the former Massachusetts governor.

Obama also crisply outlined the accomplishments of his first term in office — from saving the auto industry to killing Osama bin Laden — and framed his answer on a question about women’s rights in movingly personal terms.

Romney had his moments too, especially when describing promises Obama had made and not kept.

Romney avoided the type of rout that Obama suffered in the Oct 3 debate, but the night belonged to the president, analysts said.

“I’d say it’s a clear win for Obama,” said Boston University communications professor Tobe Berkovitz. “Certainly it would be difficult for anyone to say Romney won this debate.”

Flash polls taken after the debate pointed to an Obama win. Meanwhile, Obama’s odds for re-election on the Intrade prediction market climbed 1.6 percentage points to 63.6%.

Debates have rarely affected the outcome of US presidential elections, but this year may prove an exception. Romney silenced critics in his own party and reversed a month of missteps with a strong performance in the first debate. A week later, he had wiped out Obama’s lead in opinion polls.

That “bounce” for Romney has slipped in recent days, according to Reuters/Ipsos tracking polls. Obama led Romney by three percentage points in the daily Reuters/Ipsos poll on Tuesday.

“This will give the president a bit of a bounce and a little bit of an edge, but it’s going to be quite close right down to the wire,” said Notre Dame University political science professor Michael Desch.

The final presidential debate, scheduled for Monday in Boca Raton, Florida, probably will matter less.

Some 10% of voters have cast their ballots already, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling data, and that figure will climb sharply as both campaigns kick their get-out-the-vote operations into gear and urge supporters to take advantage of state laws that allow early voting.

Foreign policy, the topic of next week’s debate, takes a distant back seat to economic concerns for most voters.

It was a foreign policy discussion that led to Romney’s most uncomfortable moment on Tuesday, as he bungled what could have been an opportunity to plant doubts in voters’ minds about Obama’s handling of the attacks on diplomatic facilities in Libya last month. Romney hoped to use the incident to erode Obama’s national security credentials. Instead, he fought with the moderator, CNN’s Candy Crowley, over whether he was accurately characterising Obama’s remarks about whether the incident was a terror attack.

The exchange left Romney aides fuming at Crowley, while Obama was able to avoid the question of whether his administration had protected the facility adequately.

Obama also danced around other questions that could have tripped him up.

He turned a question about gun control — an unpopular issue for voters in many battleground states — into an opportunity to point out Romney’s shifting positions on the issue.

Obama responded to a question on petrol prices by noting they had been low when he took office only because of the recession he inherited.

“It’s conceivable that Governor Romney could bring down gas prices, because with his policies we’d be back in that same mess,” he said, drawing laughter from the crowd.

Aside from his blown opportunity on Libya, Romney did not do poorly. He reminded viewers that Obama had failed to fulfil promises to cut the deficit in half and introduce immigration reform legislation, and he warned that too many people are still out of work.

“If you elect President Obama, you know what you’re going to get,” he said. “You’re going to get a repeat of the last four years.”

Romney’s performance probably did not hurt his chances of winning the White House, analysts said. But Obama probably boosted his odds by turning in the focused, aggressive performance supporters had hoped to see in the first debate.

“They’re thinking: ‘We’re back in the ball game,’ ” said Robert Lehrman, a former speech writer for Democratic vice-president Al Gore who now teaches at American University.

“It wasn’t that Romney got worse — Obama got a lot better.”

TALKING POINTS

LIBYA.

Romney and Obama tangled for the first time face-to-face — and heatedly — over the administration’s handling of the September attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed the US ambassador and three other Americans.

Romney accused Obama of taking too long to refer to the attack as a terrorist strike, and of turning too quickly to politics after the tragedy. Obama later pointed out that he referred to “acts of terror” the very next day.

Romney told the audience: “On the day following the assassination of the United States ambassador, the first time that’s happened since 1979, when — when we have four Americans killed there, when apparently we didn’t know what happened, that the president, the day after that happened, flies to Las Vegas for a political fund-raiser.”

Visibly upset, Obama said he went to the Rose Garden the day after the attack to pledge that he would find out what happened, and met with grieving families.

“And the suggestion that anybody in my team, whether the secretary of state, our UN ambassador, anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, governor, is offensive. That’s not what we do. That’s not what I do as president, that’s not what I do as commander in chief.”

OBAMA, THE AGGRESSOR.

Obama came out swinging, striking immediately at Romney’s opposition to the Democrat’s handling of the auto industry bailout.

Obama was seen as having missed opportunities to make gains in the first debate with Romney two weeks ago.

In their second meeting, Obama accused Romney of letting the oil companies write the energy policies, and said Romney had “gone to a more extreme place when it comes to social policy” than George W Bush.

Obama’s style was also much more confrontational. He addressed Romney directly, unlike their first debate in Denver, when Obama addressed mainly the moderator and the audience.

Several times Obama accused Romney of being untruthful, repeating “what you’re saying is just not true.”

BACK AND FORTH.

Not only was Obama more aggressive, the president and Romney circled around each other — at times standing face to face — in moves that seemed more choreographed by a boxing trainer than a debate coach.

Their exchanges were equally animated. At times they spoke loudly over each other as moderator Candy Crowley tried to keep order.

“Gov Romney, keep it short,” Crowley said.

“Just going to make a point,” Romney shot back.

“I’m used to being interrupted,” Obama quipped.

ZINGERS.

The second debate had plenty of sharp, one-liners.

At one point, Romney asked the president if he had looked at his pension lately. Obama shot back: “I don’t look at my pension. It’s not as big as yours so it doesn’t take as long.”

Romney said Obama’s handling of the economy had hurt millions of families. “The middle class has been crushed over the last four years, and jobs have been too scarce,” Romney said, a line that he returned to later in the evening.

Obama offered another zinger when he accused Romney of hiding the specifics of his tax plan. “We haven’t heard from the governor any specifics, beyond Big Bird and eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood.”

THE 47% EMERGES.

After the first debate, many Democrats said they were surprised that Obama never brought up Romney’s videotaped remarks that 47% of Americans are dependent on the government. This time, Obama turned it into his closing statement.

Asked about misperceptions of their candidacies, Romney said Obama’s campaign had tried to turn him into something he is not and told the audience that he cares “about 100% of the American people”.

When it came time for Obama to respond, the president pounced, saying that when Romney said “behind closed doors” that 47% considered themselves victims, “think about who he was talking about”. He rattled off a litany of key voting groups: The elderly receiving Social Security, veterans, students, and soldiers.

Obama said he wanted to “fight for them... If they succeed, I believe this country succeeds.”