Romney: “I love Big Bird”

The candidates were asked what they would do to cut waste out of the federal budget and each took a decidedly different approach. But the most memorable response goes to Romney, who took a direct shot at the beloved "Sesame Street" character, Big Bird.

"I'm sorry, Jim, I'm going to stop the subsidy to PBS," Romney said to debate moderator Jim Lehrer. "I'm going to stop other things. I like PBS, I love Big Bird. Actually I like you, too. But I'm not going to -- I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for [it]."

Obama did not specifically defend PBS, but instead gave a more general answer about his efforts to cut government spending: "We went after medical fraud in Medicare and Medicaid very aggressively, more aggressively than ever before, and have saved tens of billions of dollars, $50 billion of waste taken out of the system."

The president continued: "I worked with Democrats and Republicans to cut a trillion dollars out of our discretionary domestic budget. That's the largest cut in the discretionary domestic budget since Dwight Eisenhower."