Obama embraces economic record in new commercial

JULIE PACE

Asso­ci­ated Press

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — With the econ­omy show­ing some signs of improve­ment three weeks before Elec­tion Day, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama on Mon­day laid down a full embrace of the eco­nomic record many Repub­li­cans say is his biggest weakness.

The president’s first act in this crit­i­cal cam­paign week was to announce a new bat­tle­ground state adver­tise­ment fea­tur­ing vot­ers dis­cussing the ways their eco­nomic con­di­tions have improved dur­ing his term. The ad was hit­ting the air­waves as Obama and Repub­li­can chal­lenger Mitt Rom­ney hud­dled in intense prepa­ra­tion for their sec­ond debate as polls show a closely fought campaign.

“This race is tied,” Obama said in an appeal to sup­port­ers ask­ing them to donate at least $5 to his re-election effort. He promised to be “fight­ing” for the elec­tion on the debate stage Tues­day night — some­thing many of his sup­port­ers thought he did too lit­tle of in his first face-off with Romney.

GOP vice pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Paul Ryan lam­basted Obama’s han­dling of the deficit dur­ing an appear­ance Mon­day in Ryan’s home state of Wis­con­sin. He pointed to a dig­i­tal score­board his cam­paign set up at the far end of Car­roll University’s field house that tracked the growth of the nation’s deficit in real time.

“Look at how fast those num­bers are run­ning,” Ryan said. “We know with­out a shred of doubt that we have con­signed the next gen­er­a­tion to this path of debt.”

He acknowl­edged that Obama inher­ited “a tough sit­u­a­tion” when he took office but argued the pres­i­dent has only made things worse. He touted Romney’s plan to cut taxes by 20 per­cent across the board as the path back to eco­nomic growth.

Even as polls show the race tight­en­ing nation­ally and in bat­tle­ground states, Obama’s cam­paign aides say they are encour­aged by pub­lic and pri­vate sur­veys show­ing vot­ers grow­ing more con­fi­dent about the direc­tion of the econ­omy. Those trends are behind the new 30-second spot the cam­paign is run­ning in Col­orado, Iowa, Nevada and Virginia.

“Stick with this guy,” a grav­elly voiced man says at the end of the com­mer­cial in a point Obama hopes waver­ing vot­ers will embrace. A sec­ond ad tar­geted at Ohio vot­ers fea­tures for­mer astro­naut and Sen. John Glenn tout­ing Obama’s char­ac­ter and eco­nomic record.

Aides argue that some vot­ers got a psy­cho­log­i­cal boost when the unem­ploy­ment rate fell below 8 per­cent last month for the first time since Obama’s inau­gu­ra­tion. But the cam­paign says it puts more stock in eco­nomic indi­ca­tors show­ing an increase in con­sumer con­fi­dence and retail spend­ing, which indi­cate shifts in voter behavior.

Retail sales rose 1.1 per­cent last month, the Com­merce Depart­ment said Mon­day. That fol­lowed a 1.2 per­cent increase in August, which was revised slightly higher. Both were the largest gains since Octo­ber 2010. The Com­merce Depart­ment also announced Mon­day that Amer­i­can com­pa­nies restocked their shelves at a solid pace of 0.6 per­cent in August.

Still, with mil­lions of Amer­i­cans still out of work, the cam­paign is try­ing to walk a fine line between tout­ing eco­nomic gains and acknowl­edg­ing that many vot­ers are still struggling.

Obama cam­paign spokes­woman Jen­nifer Psaki said the pres­i­dent would seek to run on his eco­nomic record, not away from it, dur­ing Tuesday’s debate.

“He would be happy to spend the entire debate talk­ing about their visions for the mid­dle class,” Psaki told reporters gath­ered in Williams­burg, Va., where Obama and his advis­ers were in the midst of an intense, three-day “debate camp” at a golf resort.

Obama’s cam­paign, seek­ing to rebound from a dis­mal first debate, promised a more ener­getic pres­i­dent would take the stage Tues­day at Hof­s­tra Uni­ver­sity in Hemp­stead, N.Y. Romney’s team aimed to build on a com­mand­ing open­ing debate that gave the Repub­li­can new life in a White House race that had once appeared to be slip­ping away from him.

“The debate was huge and we’ve seen our num­bers move all across the coun­try,” Romney’s wife, Ann, said in an inter­view on Philadel­phia radio sta­tion WPHT. She talked about the larger crowds her hus­band has been draw­ing in the after­math of that first face-off. “That’s what you call momen­tum,” she said.

Early vot­ing is already under way in dozens of states, includ­ing some bat­tle­grounds, giv­ing the can­di­dates lit­tle time to recover from any slipups.

Much of the pres­sure in the com­ing debate will be on Obama, who aides acknowl­edge showed up at the first face-off with less prac­tice — and far less energy — than they had wanted. Rom­ney, who has made no secret of the huge pri­or­ity his cam­paign puts on the debates, prac­ticed Mon­day at a hotel near his home in Massachusetts.

Romney’s advis­ers sug­gested the Repub­li­can nom­i­nee would con­tinue to mod­er­ate his mes­sage — in tone, if not sub­stance — as he did in the Oct. 3 meet­ing to help broaden his appeal to the nar­row slice of unde­cided vot­ers. In recent days, Rom­ney has promised his tax plan would not ben­e­fit the wealthy, empha­sized his work with Democ­rats as Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor and down­played plans to cur­tail women’s abor­tion rights.

Ann Rom­ney focused on the strug­gles women face in her radio inter­view. “The num­bers don’t lie and what the num­bers tell us is that more women have been hurt by this econ­omy than men, more women are unem­ployed, and more women have fallen into poverty in the last four years,” she said. “We do hear their voices.”

Dur­ing debate prepa­ra­tions, aides are work­ing on tai­lor­ing that mes­sage to a debate for­mat. They’re also work­ing on bal­anc­ing aggres­sive tac­tics with the debate’s town-hall for­mat, which often requires can­di­dates to show a con­nec­tion with ques­tion­ers from the audience.

Romney’s top-flight donors are meet­ing at New York’s tony Wal­dorf Asto­ria hotel through Wednes­day, get­ting a chance to min­gle with Ryan and attend strat­egy brief­ings and pol­icy dis­cus­sions with senior Rom­ney aides.

The retreat appears to be a scaled-down ver­sion of a posh Park City, Utah, gath­er­ing this sum­mer for Romney’s most gen­er­ous con­trib­u­tors. There, Rom­ney offi­cials hosted cam­paign updates and set ambi­tious fundrais­ing goals for the gen­eral election.

Posted by AP News on Oct 15 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.