OBAMA AND ROMNEY'S SECOND DEBATE; IS OBAMA BACK ON TOP?

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney yesterday had their second presidential debate. Heard the two men clashed again and again amid angry and at times in electric exchanges. The President was declared the debate's winner by a small margin, but it has yet to be seen if he can convert his victory into a poll turnaround before the November 6 election.

Read part of the heated debate after the cut...

“Gov. Romney doesn’t have a five-point plan, he has a one-point plan,” Obama said. “That plan is to make sure that the folks at the top play by a different set of rules.”

 Romney was unable to repeat his dominant performance of the first debate, but he did not back down.

“The President has tried, but his policies haven’t worked,” Romney said. “This is a President who has not been able to do what he said he was going to do.”

The most dramatic exchange occurred when Romney tried to pounce on the administration’s response to the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans in the attack on a U.S. Consulate there.

Romney claimed that it took Obama two weeks to deem it terrorism. Obama replied that he had done so the day after the attack, in an appearance in the White House Rose Garden.

“Yes, he did,” agreed moderator Candy Crowley, of CNN, noting that Obama denounced the “acts of terror” the day after the violence on Sept. 11.

Obama accepted responsibility for the security lapses and decried Romney’s suggestion that the White House covered up the investigation into the attacks for political gain.

“The suggestion that anybody on my team would play politics or mislead when we’ve lost four of our own, Governor, is offensive,” he bristled. “That’s not what I do as President, that’s not what I do as commander-in-chief.”
That moment seemed to briefly rattle Romney, who often appeared frustrated with the debate format.

But he also stayed on the attack, feverishly slamming Obama’s record, particularly in jump-starting the nation’s sluggish economy.

“I think you know better,” Romney told one audience member moments after Obama launched into a defense of his time in office.

“I think you know that these last four years haven’t been as good as the President described and that you don’t feel like you’re confident the next four years are going to be much better, either.”