US Presidential election: Romney wins first debate

Mr Romney landed several heavy blows during the televised live event covering domestic policy, and was particularly critical over Mr Obama’s handling of the economy.

The Democrat president, by contrast, appeared subdued and at times uncomfortable, handing an advantage back to an opponent who only days before was seen to be slipping in popularity with barely a month to go before the 6 November polling day.

“The Obama camp seems to have calculated that he just had to appear thoughtful and substantive, and not spark any fireworks, to preserve a dynamic in the race that currently favours him,” said political blogger Greg Sargent.

“But the result was that Romney came across as feistier and more energetic than Obama did. Obama repeatedly failed to seize opportunities to expose Romney in a powerful and compelling enough way on the stark ideological differences between the two men.

“Romney took command. Obama didn’t fight. Beyond the noise of the policy back and forth, voters sense this kind of thing on a basic level. More of this from Obama will demoralise supporters and feed a bad developing press narrative about Romney as the hungry challenger on offence, gaining momentum daily.”

Opinion polls over the coming days will determine if Mr Romney has made much headway into Mr Obama’s lead of an average of three points in American opinion polls, but Karl Rove, a former senior adviser to president George W Bush, said yesterday that the debate had turned the campaign into “a horse race”, with the incumbent in “grave danger”.

Senior Democrats put on a brave face yesterday over Mr Obama’s flat performance and his failure to attack Mr Romney over recent gaffes, including a secretly filmed video that captured him at a fundraising dinner attacking the 47 per cent of Americans who pay no income tax. “Governor Romney is certainly a skilled debater. And last night he was able to elevate his level of performance. But he did not change the fundamental dynamics of this race, nor did he change some of the policies that actually got us into the economic mess that we have,” said Martin O’Malley, governor of Maryland and a close Obama ally.

“Today is a new day. Everybody wakes up, when we go back for the last 35, 36 days of this campaign. What you have to look at in the course of a campaign is not any one day or any one performance. I’ve been in these debates, and always, it seems, that the challenger has an edge in that very first debate,” he said.

A poll taken by the cable news channel CNN immediately after the debate, which took place at the University of Colorado, Denver, and was watched by an estimated US television audience of 50 million, revealed that 67 per cent of the viewers questioned considered Mr Romney to be the winner. Only 25 per cent believed the president came out on top.

“It was a clear victory for Governor Romney. If it was a boxing match, it would have been called,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior adviser to the Republican challenger.

“I’ve got to believe that the heels on the president’s shoes are worn down from being back on them for 90 minutes.”

Scoring big for Mr Romney was his attack on the president’s economic policies during his first term in office, which, he said, had hit families in the pocket.

“The people having the hard time right now are middle-income Americans. Under the president’s policies, middle-income Americans have been buried,” he said.

“They’ve seen their income come down by $4,300 [£2,600]. This is a tax in and of itself. I’ll call it the economy tax. Middle-income families are being crushed. The question is how to get them going again, and it’s energy and trade, the right kind of training programmes, balancing our budget and helping small business. Those are the cornerstones of my plan.”

Mr Obama scored some points in the healthcare section of the debate, in which he insisted that his flagship Affordable Care Act, which Mr Romney has pledged to repeal, was similar in content to a plan promoted by his opponent during his time as governor of Massachusetts.

“The irony is that we’ve seen this model work really well in Massachusetts because Gov Romney did a good thing, working with Democrats in the state to set up what is essentially the identical model and, as a consequence, people are covered there,” Mr Obama said.

“It hasn’t destroyed jobs and as a consequence we now have a system in which we have the opportunity to start bringing down costs as opposed to just leaving millions of people out in the cold.

“Gov Romney said this has to be done on a bipartisan basis. This was a bipartisan idea. In fact, it was a Republican idea. And Gov Romney, at the beginning of this debate, wrote and said what we did in Massachusetts could be a model for the nation.”

The candidates resumed campaigning yesterday with Mr Obama, 51, appearing relaxed at a morning grassroots rally in Denver before flying to an afternoon event in Wisconsin.