Obama and Romney hit campaign trail after biting debate

US President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney have returned to the campaign trail, a day after their fractious televised debate.

Sparks flew as Mr Obama took the fight to Mr Romney from the very start of Tuesday's encounter in New York.
But the former Massachusetts governor fought back assertively, hammering away at his rival over the fragile economy.
Post-debate audience polls gave the edge to Mr Obama, who was widely judged to have lost their first head-to-head.
BBC North America editor Mark Mardell says Mr Obama has stopped the panic in his camp.
What the president's campaign would have dreaded was anything that contributed to a narrative of decline and defeat for the Democrat as he reaches for a second term, our correspondent adds.

Bruising exchanges With 20 days to go until the 6 November vote, the race is deadlocked.

Mr Obama travelled to the key swing states of Iowa and Ohio on Wednesday, while Mr Romney held campaign events in Virginia, another potentially crucial election battleground.

The true impact of Tuesday night's encounter will not become clear for a couple of days once opinion pollsters have conducted national and state-by-state surveys.
But 65.6 million people watched the debate, according to Nielsen, nearly the same number that tuned into the first presidential debate.

Mr Romney made gains nationally and in swing states after an assured performance during his first debate against a listless Mr Obama two weeks ago in Denver, Colorado.
But it was a much more fired-up president who appeared for the town hall-style forum at Hofstra University on Long Island to take questions from an audience of 80 undecided voters.
Mr Romney, however, ceded little ground, setting the stage for a series of bruising exchanges that crackled with tension.

The two candidates stalked the stage, frequently interrupting and intruding on each other's personal space.

Obama's rebuke
One major flashpoint revolved around last month's assault on the US Libya consulate, which Mr Romney said amounted to an "unravelling" of the president's foreign policy.

Mr Romney said his rival's administration had quibbled for too long about whether to label it a terrorist attack. But Obama said he had described it as such the day afterwards at the White House.

The moderator, CNN's Candy Crowley, interrupted Mr Romney to back the president's account, an intervention that has sparked uproar among conservative commentators

Mr Obama glared at his challenger as he rebuked him, saying it was "offensive" to suggest that he had played politics with an attack that claimed four American lives.
Mr Romney aggressively returned Mr Obama's fire, accusing him of a litany of broken promises and a record of failure.
He delivered a series of stinging attacks on the president over the economy, charging him with failing to curb high unemployment or ballooning deficits.
"The president wants to do well, I understand," Mr Romney said. "But the policies he put in place have not let this economy take off as it could have.

Zinger He added: "If the president were re-elected, we'd go to almost $20 trillion of national debt. This puts us on a road to Greece."

But Mr Obama claimed Mr Romney's economic proposals amounted to a tax cut for the wealthy at the expense of working families, forcing his multimillionaire opponent to make repeated denials.
Mr Obama produced one of the night's few zingers, about the Republican's wealth.
Mr Romney was defending his investments in China through a blind trust when he asked his rival if he had checked his own retirement plan.

"You know, I don't look at my pension," the president said. "It's not as big as yours."
The two candidates made repeated pitches for the all-important female vote, but Mr Romney's choice of words as he described his support for equal opportunities prompted online ridicule.
The Republican said that while he was Massachusetts governor he once had "binders full of women" candidates for cabinet jobs.
The third and final presidential debate is scheduled for 22 October in Boca Raton, Florida.

source: BBC

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