Obama, Romney in final sprint to Election Day

DAYTON — The endgame at hand, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama and Repub­li­can Mitt Rom­ney plunged into the final two weeks of an excru­ci­at­ingly close race for the White House Tues­day with TV adver­tis­ing near­ing an astro­nom­i­cal $1 bil­lion and mil­lions of Amer­i­cans cast­ing early bal­lots in all regions of the country.

Increas­ingly, Ohio looms as ground zero in a cam­paign waged in tough eco­nomic times. The state’s unem­ploy­ment of 7 per­cent is well below the national aver­age of 7.8 per­cent, Obama has cam­paigned here more than in any other state and Rom­ney has booked a heavy sched­ule of appear­ances in hopes of a breakthrough.

The econ­omy was the theme Tues­day as the two rivals put their final, for­eign policy-focused debate behind.

Obama bran­dished a new 20-page sum­mary of his second-term agenda and told a cam­paign crowd in Florida his rival’s blue­print “doesn’t really cre­ate jobs. His deficit plan doesn’t reduce the deficit; it adds to it.”

More than that, he said Rom­ney changes his posi­tions so often that he can’t be trusted.

In Day­ton, Obama said of his rival: “In the clos­ing weeks of the cam­paign, he’s doing every­thing he can to hide his true posi­tions. He is ter­rific at mak­ing pre­sen­ta­tions about stuff he thinks is wrong with Amer­ica, but he sure can’t give you an answer about what will make it right. And that’s not lead­er­ship you can trust.”

Before fly­ing to Ohio for his 17th trip of the elec­tion year, Obama also said with a hint of humil­ity, “It doesn’t mean that every can­di­date is going to get every­thing done all at once per­fectly, but you want some­body to be able to look you in the eye and say, here’s what I believe.”

Rom­ney coun­tered in an appear­ance before a large, cheer­ing crowd in Hen­der­son Nev. He said Obama wants a new term for the same poli­cies that have pro­duced slow eco­nomic growth and high unem­ploy­ment for four long years. “He is a sta­tus quo can­di­dacy. … That’s why his cam­paign is slip­ping and ours is gain­ing so much steam,” he said.

Romney’s aides dis­missed Obama’s 20-page book­let as noth­ing new, and the for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor said of the pres­i­dent, “His vision for the future is a repeat of the past.”

There seemed to be no end to the tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ing in a sea­son when vot­ers report they are heartily sick of it.

Mate­r­ial col­lected by ad track­ers showed the two can­di­dates and allied groups have spent or reserved nearly $950,000 mil­lion so far on tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials, much of it neg­a­tive, some of it harshly so. Rom­ney and GOP groups had a $100 mil­lion advan­tage over Obama and his sup­port­ers, although vari­a­tions in the pur­chase price made it dif­fi­cult to com­pare the num­ber of ads each side had run.

Increas­ingly, the two cam­paigns were focused on turn­ing out their sup­port­ers in early bal­lot­ing under way in more than half the states.

“Every sin­gle day right now is Elec­tion Day,” Obama’s cam­paign man­ager, Jim Messina, told reporters. On that, at least, Repub­li­cans offered no rebuttal.

About 5 mil­lion vot­ers have already cast bal­lots accord­ing to data col­lected by the United States Elec­tions Project at George Mason Uni­ver­sity, and about 35 mil­lion are expected to do so before Nov. 6.

While no votes will be counted until Elec­tion Day, the group said Democ­rats have cast more bal­lots than Repub­li­cans in the bat­tle­ground states of North Car­olina and Iowa by about 20 per­cent­age points, while in Nevada, about 121,000 peo­ple have voted — 49 per­cent Democ­rats and 35 per­cent Republicans.

Repub­li­cans have an early edge in Col­orado, where Repub­li­cans have cast 43 per­cent of the 25,000 bal­lots to date, to 34 per­cent for Democrats.

Romney’s camp pro­jected con­fi­dence as the race entered its final phase, still rid­ing an Octo­ber surge in the polls that began after the challenger’s dom­i­nant per­for­mance in the first pres­i­den­tial debate on Oct. 3 in Denver.

The Elec­toral Col­lege math made clear nei­ther man had sealed a victory.

Wins in Ohio and in Wis­con­sin — a state that Democ­rats have car­ried in the past six pres­i­den­tial elec­tions — would leave Obama only 5 elec­toral votes short of the 270 needed for victory.

That placed a pre­mium on Ohio — read­ily appar­ent from the can­di­dates’ cam­paign sched­ules and the mil­lions in tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ing flood­ing the state.

Rom­ney arrives in Cincin­nati on Wednes­day night after his West­ern swing, and he is expected to spend all day Thurs­day and part of Fri­day cam­paign­ing across the state.

His run­ning mate, Paul Ryan, is to deliver a speech on the econ­omy Thurs­day at Cleve­land State Uni­ver­sity, some­thing of an unusual event in a cam­paign with only two weeks to run.

Obama intends to fly into the state Thurs­day at the end of a two-day cross-country trip into a half-dozen battlegrounds.

Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden was in Toledo dur­ing the day before head­ing to Day­ton to join Obama at their rally, mid-way through a three-day tour of the state.

Bar­ring a last-minute change, Obama appears on course to win states and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia that account for 237 of the 270 elec­toral votes needed for vic­tory. Rom­ney has a firm hold on states with 191 elec­toral votes.

The bat­tle­grounds account for the remain­ing 110 elec­toral votes: Florida (29), North Car­olina (15), Vir­ginia (13), New Hamp­shire (4), Iowa (6), Col­orado (9), Nevada (6), Ohio (18) and Wis­con­sin (10).

Posted by AP News on Oct 23 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.