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Presidential debate 2012: Fight night on Long Island

By: Alexander Burns October 16, 2012 05:57 PM EDT

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney circled each other on stage at the outset of a tense town hall debate here on Long Island Tuesday, as Obama opened the evening with a blunt attack on Romneys credentials and job-creation plans. Under pressure from his own party to deliver a more aggressive performance than he did in the first debate in Denver, Obama used the first question of the evening from a college student asking about the jobs market to critique Romneys stance on the 2009 auto bailouts and his economic philosophy more broadly. (PHOTOS: Scenes from the Hofstra debate) When Gov. Romney said we should let Detroit go bankrupt, I said were going to bet on American workers, Obama said. Gov. Romney doesnt have a five-point [jobs] 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. In Romneys corporate career, Obama said, the Republican would take over a company, bankrupt it, lay off the workers to turn a profit. (PHOTOS: 10 memorable town hall moments) It was a far more prosecutorial approach than Obama took in his first face-off in Denver one made all the more confrontational and awkward by the town hall format, which had the two candidates standing side by side and at times drawing uncomfortably close to each other. Romney, who entered the event here at Hofstra University as something of a defending champion, kept his message narrowly focused on the metrics of economic underpeformance that have defined his campaign against the president. (See also: Hofstra presidential debate transcript) What youre seeing in this country is 23 million people struggling to find a job, Romney told the first questioner. The presidents policies have been exercised over the last four years and they havent put Americans back to work. To the charge that he wanted to let the auto industry collapse, Romney insisted as he has throughout the campaign that there was little difference in the big picture between his position and Obamas: The president took Detroit bankrupt. You took General Motors bankrupt. You took Chrysler bankrupt That was a process that was necessary to get those companies back on their feet. (PHOTOS: Presidential debate moderators)

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Romney has closed on Obama in swing-state polling in recent days and was widely viewed as having bested the president in their first encounter. The Republican nominee still faces a deficit in a handful of key 2012 battlegrounds but has come a long way since last month, when prominent members of his party were all but leaving him for dead. Democrats, including top advisers to Obama, have acknowledged that the president let Romney emerge from that encounter relatively unscathed, declining to challenge the GOP candidate on a range of issues, including Romneys approach to Social Security, his views on social issues and his comments disparaging the 47 percent of Americans who do not pay income taxes. (PHOTOS: 10 great debate moments) Asked by pool reporters Tuesday morning about the upcoming debate, Obama answered: I feel fabulous. Romney arrived on Long Island earlier Tuesday but has not made any new public comments about the debate. A Pew Research Center poll published at the start of the week found voters essentially split on their expectations for the second debate. Forty-one percent of respondents said they expected Obama to get the better of the event while 37 percent picked Romney. The evenings town hall format has been the subject of some wrangling between the Obama and Romney camps over the past 48 hours. Questions are to be posed by audience members who are undecided in the 2012 election, with CNN anchor Candy Crowley selecting the questioners. (Also on POLITICO: 5 things to watch at the debate) But contrary to the campaigns preferences, Crowley indicated in advance that she might ask follow-up questions and press Obama and Romney to respond more directly to the issues raised by the audience. In the first few exchanges of the evening, she did just that. The prevailing wisdom in both parties had been that the town hall tends to reward candidates who connect on an emotional, gut level with audience members, and might have made it more difficult for either candidate to go after his opponent energetically. (Also on POLITICO: 2012 presidential debate schedule) The format didnt seem to restrain either combatant in the first half-hour of the debate. National polls have tracked a noticeable increase in Romneys support since the first debate, along with improvement in the former Massachusetts governors long-battered public image. State-level polls have shown Romney pulling into a tie or better against Obama in the critical battlegrounds of Florida and Virginia while Obama maintains a small lead in Ohio. (Also on POLITICO: Green Party ticket arrested at debate site) Should Romney rout the president a second time, Democratic concern over the state of the 2012 race could well boil over into full-fledged panic.
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The Democratic polling outfit Democracy Corps, helmed by pollster Stan Greenberg and celebrity strategist James Carville, released a memo ahead of the debate urging Obama to outline a vision of changes that help the average Joe. (VIDEO: Obama's debate prep revealed) Up until now, with Romney campaigning solely on Obamas failures, a focus on Americas middle class was enough. But it is now and there are enormous opportunities for the President to use this moment, wrote the strategists, who have periodically weighed in throughout the 2012 race to prod Obama on messaging. In the first debate, Obama did not make a bold case for the bold policies he would offer in the next four years. In the Vice Presidential debate, Joe Biden thankfully struck blows on Romneys authenticity, duplicity, truthfulness, coziness with the rich and disregard for the middle class, but he gave no hint of Obamas plans for jobs and growth. While the economy may well be the primary focus of the town hall debate, the Hofstra debate is also the first opportunity for Obama and Romney to take questions on foreign policy. Their leadoff debate, moderated by Jim Lehrer, was focused exclusively on domestic concerns. (PHOTOS: The debate stand-ins) The odds of foreign policy creeping into the conversation rose Monday evening, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton engaged the escalating controversy over last months attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya that claimed the life of a U.S. ambassador and several others. With Republicans leveling increasingly sharp criticism at the administration for failing to secure the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Clinton declared Monday that she takes responsibility for what happened in order to avoid some kind of political gotcha. It is not clear how heavily these issues weigh on the minds of voters, but Romney has incorporated the unrest in North Africa into his daily campaign message. He has called the deterioration of conditions in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere a sign that Obamas foreign policy approach has not succeeded. Obama did not respond this morning to a shouted question from the press pool about whether Clinton was right to claim responsibility for the events of last month.
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