Obama and Romney battle in second U.S. presidential debate

Friday, October 19, 2012

United States president Barack Obama criticized his presidential challenger Mitt Romney over his response to the killing of the U.S ambassador to Libya on Tuesday in the second of three presidential debates. At the debate in Hempstead, New York, President Obama was critical of Mr Romney for trying to score "political points" from the incident.

	While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release, trying to make political points, and that's not how a commander-in-chief operates
—Barack Obama

"While we were still dealing with our diplomats being threatened, Governor Romney put out a press release, trying to make political points, and that's not how a commander-in-chief operates" Obama said, referring to Romney's initial response to the incident before the full details were known of what had happened.

Mr Obama faced criticism for the apparent lack of security at the U.S Consulate in Benghazi. Tuesday, U.S Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she took responsibility for the failure in security at the counsulate, which led to the ambassador's death.

Elsewhere in the debate, there was controversy as moderator Candy Crowley appeared to side with President Obama when Mr Romney said that President Obama was not quick enough to call the killing of the ambassador "terrorism". "He did, in fact, sir," Crowley said, siding with Obama. On the day of the attack, President Obama actually said "...no acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation". Despite that comment, some of President Obama's top aides had initially attributed the killing to the film Innocence of Muslims which led to protests elsewhere in the Middle East. The rest of the debate was mostly dominated by the economy, jobs and taxes.

The next debate is scheduled to take place on October 22 at Lynn University in Florida. The candidates will be seeking to clinch the votes of the millions of undecided voters.

Barack Obama
Mitt Romney

Have an opinion on this story? Share it!

Sister links

Attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi

Sources

"'Aggressive Obama fights back in US debate'" — Channel 4 News, October 17, 2012
"'Obama hits back in fiery second debate with Romney'" — BBC News Online, October 17, 2012

Share this:

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.

Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.

The text of this article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License