Town-hall brawl

“THE American people saw their leader tonight—a strong, steady and decisive president,” crowed Jim Messina, the manager of Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, after the testy second debate between the candidates on Long Island on October 16th. He was right: Mr Obama had a good night. But the statement was also a tacit admission that at the previous debate, two weeks before, Mr Obama had seemed disengaged and unpersuasive. On that occasion, it was Mitt Romney who was on good form—so good that he erased his long-standing deficit in the polls. And unfortunately for the president, the self-possessed, reasonable and yet forceful version of Mr Romney who had shown up at their first encounter appeared again at their second, blunting the impact of Mr Obama’s resuscitation.

In the week after the first debate, Mr Romney rose from a 3.1 point deficit in the average of national polls compiled by RealClearPolitics, a website, to a 1.5% lead—his first this year. His numbers have since fallen back somewhat—RCP’s average now shows a near tie—and were never quite as strong in polls of swing states. Nonetheless, Mr Romney has transformed the race into a dead heat.

The challenger’s authoritative performance achieved two things in that first debate. First, he energised his supporters, prompting pollsters to bump up their projections of Republican turnout on election day. Second, several polls showed that women, who had previously preferred Mr Obama by large margins, decided that Mr Romney was a more likeable and moderate figure. In one poll, from the Pew Research Centre, he leapt by 18 points among female voters to a tie with the president.

In the second debate, Mr Romney naturally tried to protect these gains and Mr Obama tried to reverse them. The president was combative from the outset, insinuating that Mr Romney paid too little tax, had abetted the outsourcing of American jobs, had deliberately destroyed livelihoods to make a quick buck during his time as a private-equity investor, and had no plans in the White House beyond cosseting the rich at the expense of the middle class—all in response to the first question. Perhaps his best moment came when Mr Romney accused him of playing politics with the deaths of four American diplomats in Libya last month. Summoning a convincing blast of righteous indignation, he declared the charge “offensive”, making Mr Romney look like the opportunist.

But Mr Romney responded to Mr Obama’s assertiveness in kind, with plenty of interruptions, finger-pointing and denunciations of his own. He produced a devastating list of all the promises that the president has made, and failed to keep, about improving the economy. He repeated time and again that 23m Americans were looking for work, that the middle class was being “crushed”, that 47m Americans were on food stamps, and so on. He made a piercing refrain of the phrase, “We don’t have to settle.”

Both men made deliberate appeals to women voters. Mr Romney shied away from the view his running-mate, Paul Ryan, had espoused in the vice-presidential debate the week before, that certain employers should have a say over whether the health insurance they offered their workers covered contraception. He explained that as governor of Massachusetts he had not only hired a woman as his chief-of-staff, but also allowed her to work child-friendly flexible hours.

Mr Obama, too, eagerly pointed out that the first bill he had signed into law was one making it easier for women to sue for wage discrimination. He said Mr Romney’s hostility to Planned Parenthood, which runs a network of women’s clinics, would restrict access to cancer screenings as well as contraception. He also spoke at length of the obstacles faced by women of his mother’s and grandmother’s generation, which he hoped to remove for the sake of his two daughters.

Although several “instant” polls suggested a narrow win for Mr Obama, Mr Romney said nothing that would undo his new-found appeal among moderates. There has been a curious symmetry to the events of the past few weeks, one Republican operative notes. On the one hand, improving economic data have taken some of the sting out of Republicans’ chief criticism of the president. On the other, Mr Romney’s poise in the debates has undermined the Democrats’ main line of attack, that he is too rich and callous to understand ordinary Americans. That leaves the race about where it has been since the spring: extremely close, with perhaps the narrowest of advantages for Mr Obama.