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The town hall topics continued to focus on domestic issues, but included subjects the candidates did not tackle in their first debate like gun control and alternative energy. All of the questions were written by the people in the audience, but moderator Candy Crowley was able to pick and choose the people would have the opportunity to speak.
Unlike the first debate, where the two candidates stood behind separate podiums, Obama and Romney used the floor to their advantage during the town hall. At some points they approached the audience to engage the person who asked the question, but at other times they directly confronted each other, circling one another and pointing fingers.
Commentators agreed after the debate that the president was livelier, more assertive and better prepared for this performance than last time.
At one point, the candidates were disputing the White House's response to the attack on an American embassy in Libya, and when the president first declared the incident a "terror attack.”
The moment that got the most attention in social media was when Romney answered a question about fair pay for women and inequality in the workforce. He said that when he was governor of Massachusetts he had made an effort to bring more women onto his staff.
"I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.”
"Binders full of women," became an instant trending phrase, and largely overshadowed the rest of what was said during that exchange.
Pressure on Obama
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Commentators suspect the President's town hall performance was good enough to stop his falling poll numbers. |
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President Obama and his campaign staff were under a lot of pressure to turn out a good performance going into last night’s debate.
The town hall came two weeks after the first presidential debate, which focused on the candidates’ positions on domestic policy. After what many saw as a strong performance by Romney during the first debate, polls showed him pulling neck-in-neck with the president among likely voters for the first time in the race following his performance.
However, following a strong debate performance from Vice President Joe Biden and an effort by the Obama campaign to halt their falling poll numbers, a new Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll shows that the President began to recover ground in the days leading up to the town hall.
However, all eyes were on him to see if he would improve on his performance this
time around.
Town-Hall Style Debates
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Clinton's charismatic personal style helped him connect well to voters in his town hall debate. |
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In every election cycle for the past 20 years, one of the presidential debates has been a town-hall format where members of the audience get to ask the questions.
The format was first pushed for by Bill Clinton’s campaign staff, who knew that it would favor their candidate.
“There was a woman who asked what the candidates – how the federal debt had affected them,” recalls Presidential Historian Michael Beschloss. “George H.W. Bush politely tried to find out exactly what she meant by the question. Bill Clinton hit it out of the park. He walked right up to the edge of the audience and said, you know, when someone is fired in Arkansas, I know them, you know; I know when people are out of work, you know; I feel what they’re going through. And for that kind of a format, it was absolutely perfect.”
In the 2000 town-hall debate, Vice President Al Gore was accused of violating George W. Bush’s personal space while he spoke, eliciting a laugh from the audience and criticism from the media.
The candidates will meet in one more traditional presidential debate where they will be facing questions from moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS News on the subject of foreign policy. |
I think we've been witnessing violence for years, whether in reality through the media or through video games, and I don't think that's a first-hand effect.
