Nearly 90 minutes after the initial disagreement over foreign policy, the two men were still at it, clashing sharply over rival approaches to reducing federal deficits. Republicans and Democrats alike have said in recent days the presidential race now approximates the competitive situation in place before the two political conventions. Obama and Romney are generally separated by a point or two in national public opinion polls and in several battleground states, while the president holds a slender lead in Ohio and Wisconsin. Unprompted, Biden he brought up the video in which Romney had said 47 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax, view themselves as victims and do not take responsibility for their own lives. Ryan said in the debate's opening moments that U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens had been denied sufficient security by administration officials. Both the president and Romney campaigned in battleground states during the day before ceding the spotlight to their political partners for the evening. Ryan said Obama's health care plan had diverted $716 billion from the program for seniors and created a new board that could deny care to patients who need it. After Ryan argued that Romney's plan would pay for reduced tax rates by eliminating tax loopholes for the wealthy, Biden noted that on a recent interview on CBS' "60 Minutes," Romney defended the 14 percent tax rate he pays on his $20 million income as fair, even though it's a lower rate than some lower income taxpayers pay. Biden agreed to that, but not to his rival's underlying point, which was that it was a mistake for Obama to have announced a date for the withdrawal of the remainder of the U.S. combat troops. The fiercest clash over foreign policy came in the debate's opening moments, when Ryan cited events across the Middle East as well as Stevens' death in Libya as evidence that the administration's foreign policy was unraveling. Biden repeated the president's contention that the nation is moving in the right direction, while Ryan stated the Republican view that economic struggle persists even though Democrats had control of both houses of Congress during the first two years of Obama's term. Ryan spars frequently with Democrats during debates on legislation on the House floor and in the House Budget Committee, which he chairs, but not in a one-on-one encounter covering 90 minutes and a virtually unlimited range of topics.
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