“Virtually everything he said about my tax plan is inaccurate,” the challenger said. “If the tax plan he described were a tax plan I was asked to support, I would say absolutely not.”
Obama clings to a narrow lead in his bid to defy the omens of a stubbornly sluggish economic recovery and to become only the second Democrat since World War II to win a second term.
Romney, down in almost all the key battleground states that will decide who wins the 270 electoral votes needed to win on November 6, sought a sharp change of momentum in a race that seems to be slipping away from him.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that Romney won,” Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College, told AFP.
“He was more aggressive without being pugnacious or provocative or combative. The president seemed a bit flat. He seemed, I wouldn’t say annoyed at times, but almost disconnected, almost not comfortable.”
Despite the unrest in the Middle East, the debate focused strictly on economic issues. Foreign policy gets its turn in the final of the three presidential debates at the end of the month.
Romney, a multi-millionaire former venture capitalist, was expected to come under scrutiny over his complex offshore tax arrangements, which Democrats have highlighted to press the case that he is indifferent to middle class struggles.
But Obama did not mention these, nor Bain Capital, the controversial Boston firm that Romney co-founded on his way to amassing his huge wealth, nor the most obvious of recent slip-ups by his gaffe-plagued opponent.
The 65-year-old Romney badly needed to reset the election narrative, after a video emerged of him branding 47 percent of Americans as people who pay no taxes and see themselves as “victims” who depend on government handouts.
The 51-year-old president was marking his 20th wedding anniversary on Wednesday and began the debate with a shout-out to First Lady Michelle Obama, apologizing for the unromantic setting.
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