Barack Obama will be "strong" and "passionate" in his make-or-break second debate Tuesday with Mitt Romney, a top advisor said, as the president's re-election hopes hang in the balance. Obama and Romney meet on Long Island near New York after the Republican's nimble first debate performance and the president's disastrous showing left the race in a dead heat, with some polls showing the challenger ahead.
Another poor outing in Tuesday's town hall-style debate before 80 undecided voters at Hofstra University would significantly increase the chances that Obama is consigned to history as a one-term president. Team Romney has the president on the ropes, and his campaign signalled it was ready to deliver a hammer blow with a morning memo proclaiming that the Republican will triumph in the key state of Ohio on November 6.
"Our campaign clearly has the momentum heading into these last few weeks, as evidenced by steady movement in the polls toward governor Romney, and increased enthusiasm on the ground at our events," aide Rich Beeson said. Recent polls in the crucial Midwestern battleground state, which no Republican has lost and gone on to win the White House, show the former Massachusetts governor steadily eroding the president's narrow lead there. Campaigns typically downplay expectations ahead of a debate, but a long-time Obama lieutenant, perhaps recognising the stakes for Obama's re-election bid, predicted that the president would come roaring back.
"I think you are going to see an exceptionally strong debate performance tonight from the president," Robert Gibbs said on MSNBC. "I think you will see somebody who will be strong, who will be passionate, who will be energetic." Gibbs said Obama would not just talk about the tough four years which America has spent grinding out of an economic crisis, but his agenda for the future - two areas where he lacked focus during the first debate in Denver.
Obama has been largely out of sight since Saturday, when he flew to Williamsburg, Virginia for three days of intense debate prep. Asked by pool reporters Tuesday about his prospects as he prepared to fly to New York, the president replied jovially: "I feel fabulous. Look at this beautiful day."
Romney must prove his sure-footed performance two weeks ago was not a fluke and faces the added challenge at Hofstra of the town hall-style format, which will feature more interaction and participation from the audience. Conscious that expectations of their man are now greater, Romney aides were busily talking up the prospects of an Obama comeback as both sides fought to construct their own pre-debate media narrative.
"President Obama is going to have a better night than he had at the first debate," Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said, adding that the US leader was likely to "come out swinging with dishonest and negative attacks." "If the president chooses to attack governor Romney throughout the debate it will simply be another failed chance for him to lay out any kind of rationale or justification for his second term."
On the eve of the debate, a dramatic intervention from Hillary Clinton, Obama's former bitter Democratic Party foe and now his secretary of state, may have defused one of Romney's most damaging attacks. Clinton said she - and not Obama or Vice President Joe Biden - bore responsibility for any security lapses before the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, which killed US ambassador Chris Stevens.
"I take responsibility," she told CNN during a visit to Peru. Romney and his vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan have claimed that the Benghazi raid, and the administration's shifting accounts of it, are symptomatic of an "unravelling" of Obama's foreign policy. Many national polls show Romney and Obama locked in a tie, but the challenger can claim undeniable momentum in the battleground states that will decide who will live in the White House come January.
A USA Today/Gallup poll Tuesday showed a startling erosion of support for Obama among women, who now back Obama by just one percentage point, 49-48, in 12 swing states. The poll shows Romney's overall lead at 50-46 percent among likely voters in the swing states, due mainly to a surge in support among women voters, compared with a 49-47 Obama lead among registered voters.