DENVER — In the first debate of the fall campaign, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney defended himself Wednesday night against charges from President Barack Obama that his tax-cut plan would favor the wealthy.
At the same time, Romney appeared to take more moderate stances on issues from green energy to Social Security.
The Republican challenger, offering sharper answers than Obama and seizing control of the debate at several points, accused Obama of promising more “trickle-down government” if he is re-elected this November.
For his part, Obama tried to bury his opponent in the very thing that Romney is said to crave: “data.” Repeatedly referring to arguments offered by his leading surrogate, former President Bill Clinton, Obama tried to rebut Romney’s claim that he could balance the budget while cutting tax rates across the board and increasing military spending by $2 billion.
“Math, common sense and our history shows us that’s not a recipe for job growth,” Obama said.
Meantime, Romney spoke warmly about green energy — an Obama staple — and indicated that tax breaks for the major oil companies would probably fall by the wayside if he is elected president. He also said that he and Obama had similar ideas about Social Security and would largely avoid restructuring the program, even though he has suggested that it could well be necessary to raise the retirement age.
Romney said Obama was running on the same platform as four years ago, while the Republican promised to generate more jobs by going to the assistance of small businesses.
Obama, given the first chance to say what he would do to spur more hiring, said he would also promote jobs by using money saved from the winding-down of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to rebuild America.
Leveling a familiar charge that Romney would offer more tax breaks for the wealthy, Obama said his alternative would be “a new economic patriotism that says America does best when the middle class does best.”
Obama opened by wishing a happy anniversary to his wife, Michelle, whom he married 20 years ago Wednesday. He promised her that next year they wouldn’t be celebrating before 40 million people.
Romney joined in, offering congratulations and drawing a laugh from Obama by joking that “this is the most romantic place you could imagine” to be celebrating: “Here with me.”
He also shot back at Obama’s charge over taxes, saying that cutting taxes on the rich was “not what I’m going to do.” He said the rich would pay the same share of taxes as they do now under his plan.
Answering one question that had been hanging over the event, moderator Jim Lehrer said that the questions would be about domestic issues. There had been some speculation that foreign policy might be one of the discussion topics in the wake of the recent killing of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Libya.
Romney is lagging in the polls, but he took the stage at Wednesday night’s debate with some key advantages that could help him catch Obama.
The Republican candidate was in position to surprise the public with a strong performance; recent polls showed that most voters expected Obama to get the better of his opponent. But Romney performed well in the 19 Republican primary-season debates, often coming across as presidential and rarely slipping up.
Another factor that figured to work to Romney’s benefit: The challenger typically has a built-in edge in the first presidential debate. Merely sharing the stage with the president helps to close any stature gap in voters’ minds.
In the pre-debate spin, the Obama camp underscored that point, as both sides worked overtime to limit any gain by the other side. “If history tells us anything it’s that, as the challenger, Mitt Romney is likely to be called the winner by pundits,” deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter said in memo to reporters.
At the same time, Romney faced substantially greater pressure than Obama heading into the 90-minute encounter. For a trailing candidate, simply holding one’s own isn’t good enough.
With less than five weeks until Election Day, most opinion surveys show Obama with a small but persistent lead nationally and in swing states that will decide the contest. By contrast, Romney has never been ahead of Obama in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls dating back to the start of the year.
That gap has made it increasingly imperative for the Republican to shift the balance of the contest against the vulnerable incumbent. Obama has improved his job approval ratings and has come close to the key 50 percent level in national polls. But voters continue to say that the country is on the wrong track, though that measure has also been moving slowly in Obama’s direction.
Even Republicans said it was unlikely that Romney could accomplish the turnaround he needed in the debates.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff, co-director of the NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, said in an analysis of the latest presidential polling that it “would take an episode of some magnitude to disrupt the structural lock in these numbers.” Obama led Romney by 3 percentage points among likely voters, 49 percent to 46 percent, in the survey, released Tuesday.
Colorado, one of the few battleground states, was the scene of the first debate, and security for the event was unusually strict. A six-mile portion of Interstate 25, the state’s main north-south route, was closed for hours at the height of the evening rush in Denver. The superhighway passes a few hundred yards from the debate hall, Magness Arena, a hockey and basketball venue on the University of Denver campus.
Foreign policy is to be the subject of the third presidential debate, in Boca Raton, Fla., on Oct. 22. Obama and Romney will also meet Oct. 16, in a town-hall style debate on New York’s Long Island. Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Paul D. Ryan, Romney’s running mate, will debate Oct. 11 in Danville, Ky.
Relatively few voters are still undecided, but a slightly larger group remains weakly attached to either man. Results of the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll suggest that about 5 percent of the electorate falls into the category that both men will be attempting to sway: voters who are still up for grabs and who say that the debates will be extremely or quite important in their choice of a candidate.
The Commission on Presidential Debates, which has organized the fall debates in every election since 1988, negotiated rules for this year’s encounters with representatives of the Obama and Romney campaigns. A number of organizations from across the political spectrum have unsuccessfully sought to have the debate contract made public.
