CHARLOTTE, N.C.—President Barack Obama embarked Saturday on a four-day swing through battleground states and the storm-battered Gulf Coast in the lead-up to the Democratic National Convention, beginning Tuesday, as he seeks to blunt any momentum picked up by Republican rival Mitt Romney.
As Democrats began streaming to Charlotte for their convention, Obama headed Saturday to Iowa on the first leg of a tour of states key to his hopes for winning re-election. Romney, for his part, looked to capitalize on a newly energized Republican Party fresh from its convention last week in Tampa, Fla.
Both candidates were crisscrossing the country as the race entered September, each day adding to the sense of urgency in a presidential contest that has remained tight since Romney sewed up the nomination in April. Both campaigns recognize that undecided elements of the electorate, including those in about eight key states, will begin to fully assess their options through the conventions and the upcoming debates in the weeks ahead before the Nov. 6 election.
Obama accused Romney and Republicans at their three-day convention in Tampa of offering outdated ideas that are ill-suited to voters.
“Despite all the challenges that we face in this new century, what they offered over those three days was, more often than not, an agenda that was better suited for the last century,” Obama said in Urbandale, Iowa, on a sprawling 500-acre property that serves as a museum of farming history.
“It was a rerun. We’d seen it before. You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV,” the president said.
At a rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, Romney vowed to bring more jobs to the country, pointing to the 23 million people out of work or underemployed.
“If you have a coach that’s 0 and 23 million, you say it’s time to get a new coach,” Romney said in a retooled campaign speech as the college football season kicked off across the U.S. “It’s time for America to see a winning season again, and we’re going to bring it to them.”
Flanked by House Speaker John Boehner and leading Ohio Republicans, Romney vowed to cut the deficit and work toward balancing the budget, open new markets for American products and crack down on unfair trade practices by competitors, issues closely watched by voters dependent on Ohio’s manufacturing base. The new Republican nominee’s voice grew hoarse as he unveiled a slimmed-down version of his convention address with a heavy emphasis on his jobs agenda.
Both Romney and running mate Paul Ryan focused their attention on Ohio — the Wisconsin congressman shook hands with voters and flipped burgers in the parking lot of Ohio Stadium in Columbus before the start of an opening weekend football game between Ohio State and Ryan’s alma mater, Miami University of Ohio.
Ohio is a linchpin in Romney’s strategy, a recognition that no Republican has won the White House without carrying the Midwestern battleground state. No Democrat has won without winning Ohio since John F. Kennedy in 1960.
Later Saturday, Romney and Ryan made a joint appearance at a rally in Jacksonville, Fla. — another tossup state he needs to carry in the Nov. 6 election to defeat Obama.
“We recognize what a great responsibility you’ve given us,” Romney said at Cincinnati’s Union Terminal, “and how much you expect from us to be able to get back the White House and get America back on track.”
Obama’s run-up to the convention will take him through the battleground states of Iowa, Colorado, Ohio and Virginia, four states that he carried in 2008 but remain at the top of Romney’s wish list. He was spending Saturday in suburban Des Moines and Sioux City, Iowa, before heading to Colorado for a Sunday event with college students at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Presidents are not chosen by a nationwide popular vote but in state-by-state contests, making battleground states — which are neither reliably Republican nor Democratic — especially important.
In Iowa, Obama assailed Romney’s three-day convention of any new ideas to help voters struggling with an economy saddled with an unemployment rate of 8.3 per cent.
“There was a lot of talk about hard truths and bold choices, but nobody ever actually bothered to tell you what they were,” Obama said. “And when Gov. Romney had his chance to let you in on his secret, he did not offer a single new idea, just retreads of the same old policies that have been sticking it to the middle class for years.”
The Democratic Party’s convention will focus more on where voters want their lives to be in the next four years. Obama inherited an economy grappling with the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the pace of the sluggish recovery has become one of the president’s greatest impediments to re-election.
The coming days, capped by Obama’s speech on Thursday night, will crystalize his re-election pitch: an economy built on ending tax cuts for the rich and putting more effort into education, energy, tax reform and debt reduction. He will call Romney a peddler of failed trickle-down ideas that will hurt the middle class and the needy.
At the event itself, first lady Michelle Obama will command the stage one night, followed the next by former President Bill Clinton, who will ask voters to remember the good times and pledge that Obama can return them.
Previewing the convention, Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday that by the end of the Charlotte convention, “voters will understand what is at stake.”
“They will know what the road map is going forward. And the race will be a pretty steady race. And we expect it to be in a pretty similar place following our convention as well. We know it’s going to be close,” she said.
Romney made a quick detour to rain-soaked Louisiana on Friday while Obama joined soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas, to remind the nation that he ended the war in Iraq. Obama was scheduled to travel to Louisiana on Monday to inspect flood damage from Hurricane Isaac that struck on the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation.
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