Given the opportunity, an audience of 140 normal people from Missouri told the two candidates for president, “Show me.”

Tough and to the point, the questions thrown at President Bush and Sen. John Kerry on Friday during the second of three presidential debates cut to the core of many important issues.

Getting mad doesn’t win many fans among swing voters, and Bush got mad.

It was a tough night for the president in St. Louis, and it showed from the first question to the last. At the end of the night, Bush was asked to name three mistakes he’d made during his time in office. The best answer he could come up with: He hired some wrong people.

After an early question to Kerry about whether he’s wishy-washy, the topic moved to Iraq and America’s standing in the world.

Much of the language was familiar to campaign watchers, but where Kerry seemed confident, the president came across as overeager and even angry at times.

Both men scored early with good lines. Bush turned a nice phrase that sums up his argument for attacking Iraq better than he has before: “Saddam Hussein was a unique threat.”

Kerry countered, still talking about Iraq, “The military’s job is to win the war. The president’s job is to win the peace.” That puts a fine point on the shortcomings of the Iraq occupation.

But much of the debate centered on the two men force-fitting their stump speeches into the questions that were asked. Kerry continued his attack on the president’s record, and Bush pushed to define Kerry as inconsistent.

On an issue especially relevant to Maine, the first question on domestic policy asked about the reimportation of drugs from Canada, citing the president’s efforts to block it. Bush offered an unconvincing answer about ensuring safety. Kerry challenged the president on statements he made during the debates in 2000, when he said he would support reimportation. The argument got under the president’s skin.

Bush resorted to many of the charges he makes on the campaign trail that have been disputed, including that Kerry voted 98 times to raise taxes. Those numbers have been refuted by FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan organization which is tracking the race. He also called Kerry’s health care plan a government takeover. It is not.

But it put Kerry on the defensive, trying to explain why the liberal label doesn’t fit. Kerry supported balanced budgets during the Clinton administration, and Goldman Sachs has said his plan for the economy is credible. By many standards, though, Kerry is liberal.

It’s misleading when the president says 900,000 small businesses would face higher taxes under Kerry’s plan. According to FactCheck.org, only about 400,000 small businesses would be affected. The rest of the 900,000 are wealthy individuals. President Bush would have qualified as a small business based on his 2001 tax return because he reported $84 of business income from part ownership in a timber-growing enterprise. He joked about that, but the information comes from his tax records.

President Bush has had a tough eight days, which began with his poor performance during the first debate with Kerry Sept. 30. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that Iraq had no substantive ties to al-Qaida, occupation leader Paul Bremer said he never had enough troops in Iraq and told the administration so, and a CIA report found that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and that his capacity had ended after the first Gulf War and was in a steady state of decline. And on Friday, the Department of Labor released a disappointing job report for September. Maybe these were some of the hiring mistakes the president talked about.

Kerry missed an important opportunity to hit the president on his environmental rhetoric and was prone to stuffing too much information into his answers.

Bush needed a strong performance Friday night. He improved on his performance from the first debate, but he still has not recaptured his form from the 2000 election, when he outmatched Vice President Al Gore.

In the town-hall format, audience members submitted questions in advance to moderator Charlie Gibson from ABC. The audience was made up of people who do not strongly support either Bush or Kerry and undecided voters, chosen by the polling firm Gallop. Questions were divided between foreign and domestic policy.

If questioners had been allowed a follow-up to hold the two accountable on their answers, things would have been even more interesting. The questions did seem tougher on the president, although Kerry faced a hard task in defending his position on abortion and whether he would allow federal money to pay for the procedure. He never really answered the question.

There was one shortcoming. Not a single question was asked about Afghanistan, where elections began today. It shows just how far that conflict has fallen in the interest of voters.

Since the first debate last Thursday, Kerry has gained ground in several national polls. One of the most recent, from Time magazine, has the two men tied at 45 percent, a 12 point swing from pre-debate numbers when Bush had a six point lead. An Associated Press poll released Thursday shows Kerry with a slight lead.

About 62 million people watched the first presidential debate. About 40 million watched the debate between Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John Edwards. Competing against a Friday night out and a full high school football schedule in many parts of the country, viewership could have suffered.

Kerry will be playing for the sweep on Oct. 13 in Arizona when the two men debate domestic policy.