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In Final Push, an Appeal to the Center as Well as the Base In Final Push, an Appeal to the Center as Well as the Base
(about 5 hours later)
President Obama and Mitt Romney embraced dueling imperatives as they began their sprint to the finish on Tuesday: trying to close the sale with moderate and undecided voters through high-minded appeals and a centrist tone even as they sought to energize their ideological bases and disqualify each other with a barrage of new attacks. DAYTON, Ohio — President Obama started making his closing argument for a second term on Tuesday, beginning a furious two-week effort to beat back a late surge by Mitt Romney and hang on to battleground states where many voters are already casting ballots in large numbers.
Mr. Obama seized on both tasks quickly on Tuesday, emerging from his final debate with Mr. Romney to unveil a slick booklet restating his second-term agenda and a television ad in which he looks into the camera and declares: “It’s an honor to be your president, and I’m asking for your vote.” At the beginning of what the campaign described as a round-the-clock blitz, and on the day after his final debate, Mr. Obama tried to address what polling has shown is a consistent question among voters: What kind of agenda does he have for a second term? He released a 20-page booklet encapsulating previously announced policies and contrasting his positions to those of Mr. Romney.
At an enthusiastic rally of about 11,000 supporters in Delray Beach, Fla., Mr. Obama referred to the agenda, saying, “look right here and find out what it is I intend to do in a second term.” Aides said they were printing 3.5 million copies of the pamphlet to mail and hand out in battleground states. The document contains no new proposals, and was derided by a spokesman for Mr. Romney as a “glossy panic button.” But along with a new television advertisement that began running in nine battleground states, the president’s aides predicted it would help counter the Romney assault plan for the next two weeks that aims to convince voters that Mr. Obama has no plans to fix the ailing economy.
But moments later, Mr. Obama returned to his urgent effort to disqualify Mr. Romney as a legitimate successor in the Oval Office. Mr. Romney, he said, wants to “turn back the clock 50 years for immigrants and gays and women” and is pursuing a foreign policy that is “all over the map.” Mr. Romney and his campaign spent Tuesday pounding away at points Mr. Romney made during the debate on Monday night, including accusing the president of apologizing for the United States and cutting military spending excessively. Mr. Romney flew from Florida to Nevada, where he mocked Mr. Obama’s attacks on him as desperate moves by a losing candidate.
Mr. Romney began his post-debate travels on Tuesday with his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, in Nevada and Colorado. On Wednesday, Mr. Romney will make another stop in Nevada and then continue on to Iowa. “You know, the truth is that attacks on me are not an agenda,” Mr. Romney said to a crowd of about 6,000 people in Henderson, Nev. “His is a status quo candidacy. His is a message of going forward with the same policies of the last four years, and that’s why his campaign is slipping, and that’s why ours is gaining so much steam.”
With polls suggesting that Mr. Romney has seized momentum in the race, the president’s top strategists said they would make final appeals to independents, moderates, women and members of minority groups even as they offer lacerating assessments of Mr. Romney’s lack of qualifications or credibility. In the president’s minute-long ad, and in appearances at the start of a frenetic week, Mr. Obama stepped up his effort to convince the nation that he had brought it back from the brink of economic collapse and that Mr. Romney would embrace the policies that caused the problems. Looking directly into the camera, the president asks voters to “read my plan, compare it to Governor Romney’s and decide which is better for you.”
“I think it is a single message,” David Axelrod, the president’s top strategist, said Tuesday morning. He said Mr. Obama’s “strong message” contrasts sharply with a Republican candidate who is “uncertain, unsteady, and whose policies have been consistently wrong.” But even as he sought to strike a positive note at the start of a three-day swing that is taking him through Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, Florida and Virginia, Mr. Obama also enthusiastically stepped up his attacks. The Republican candidate, the president said at a rally in Florida, wants to “turn back the clock 50 years for immigrants and gays and women” and is pursuing a foreign policy that is “all over the map.”
Mr. Romney’s campaign responded by pointing to what they said were “increasingly desperate attacks” and issued a memorandum to reporters dismissing Mr. Obama’s agenda as nothing more than a “glossy pamphlet.” Lanhee Chen, Mr. Romney’s policy director, accused the president’s administration of “intellectual bankruptcy.” Appearing later with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at a raucous rally before 9,500 people in Dayton, the president went into a spirited assault, using his new favorite attack word — “Romnesia” — to highlight his rival’s position on the auto bailout, which the White House says was vital to saving jobs in Ohio and throughout the Midwest.
The tone was an abrupt shift from Monday night’s debate, when Mr. Romney aimed squarely for the political center and repeatedly agreed with the president even as Mr. Obama launched a barrage of attacks. By Tuesday, Mr. Romney’s reticence to challenge his rival was gone as his campaign released a television ad accusing the president of apologizing for America around the world. “Last night, Governor Romney looked me right in the eye, tried to pretend he never said, ‘Let Detroit go bankrupt,’ ” Mr. Obama said, one of many instances all day when he suggested Mr. Romney was not being honest about his positions as he seeks to appeal to a general-election audience after a Republican primary campaign in which he emphasized conservative stances.
“The president began with an apology tour, of going to various nations and criticizing America,” Mr. Romney says in the ad. He said America’s adversaries “looked at that and saw weakness.” With polls suggesting that Mr. Romney has seized momentum, Mr. Obama’s top strategists described twin approaches: to make final appeals to independents, moderates, women and minorities as they offer lacerating assessments of Mr. Romney’s qualifications and credibility.
Both men immediately fanned out across the country for a final blitz of the seven or eight battleground states that their advisers believe will decide who can claim 270 electoral votes to win on Election Day. Mr. Obama opened in Florida with the first of three rallies on Tuesday before starting a 48-hour, six-state blitz on Wednesday. Mr. Romney flew to Nevada for his late-night rally, leaving Tuesday’s stage largely to Mr. Obama. Still, Mr. Obama’s schedule and the tenor of his campaign appearances made clear that his primary mission now was to energize his own supporters and get them to vote, preferably right away. In Florida, where he appeared in the morning, and later in Ohio, the constant refrain at his rallies was “Vote! Vote! Vote!” Early voting begins in Florida on Saturday and is already under way in Ohio.The terrain that Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney are covering this week illustrates a battleground within a battleground. The campaigns are advertising in nine states — stretching from North Carolina to Nevada — but are spending most of their most crucial resource — their time — in the Midwest.
The brutal, final push will take the president and Mr. Romney to just about every region of the country multiple times in the next 14 days. There are competitive battleground states in the South, the West, the Midwest, the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast. None can be taken lightly in a race that remains very close. Mr. Romney is scheduled to zip back and forth on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday between Ohio and Iowa. Winning those states is the most efficient way for him to block Mr. Obama from returning to the White House or for Mr. Obama to lock down a path to 270 electoral votes.
Mr. Obama’s six-state swing will begin on Wednesday with stops in Davenport, Iowa; Denver, Las Vegas and a brief stop in Los Angeles to tape an appearance on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno. On Thursday, Mr. Obama will be back in Florida and Ohio, as well as Virginia. In a sign of the closeness of the race, a “super PAC” supporting Mr. Romney, Restore Our Future, reserved television time in Maine, traditionally a Democratic state. Maine allocates its electoral votes by Congressional district, and Mr. Romney’s supporters hope they may be able to pick off the single electoral vote available from the state’s more conservative Second District.
With voting already under way in many of the most competitive states, strategists for both sides predicted that victory was within reach after a long and contentious political summer. In the final two weeks Mr. Romney has the challenge of maintaining a strategy of presenting himself as more reasonable and pragmatic than the image the White House built of him over the summer: that of an out-of-touch, job-killing plutocrat. But to the degree that strategy involves emphasizing more moderate positions than he stressed during the Republican primary campaign, it creates the potential for him to face renewed questions among conservatives on his ideological commitment.
Strategists for the Republican campaign said Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, enters the final two weeks having upended the race’s summertime dynamic and in a position to win the presidency. Mr. Obama’s double-digit leads from a month ago in national and state surveys have largely shrunk or evaporated. Conversations with a half-dozen conservative activists on Tuesday suggested that many were cutting Mr. Romney some slack. “There’s a caricature of Romney that the Obama campaign has put out, and when he doesn’t fit the caricature he is accused of changing his view,” said Gary L. Bauer, president of the Christian advocacy group American Values.
“As much as President Obama might try, you can’t gloss over four years like the last four,” Mr. Chen wrote for Mr. Romney’s campaign. “And you can’t fool the American people into thinking you have a real plan for the future when all you are offering is more of the same.” In the final weeks, Mr. Romney’s campaign has been discussing ways to build on gains that have shown him closing Mr. Obama’s lead in polls in states like Ohio. Mr. Romney plans to deliver what the campaign describes as a major jobs and debt speech on Thursday in Cincinnati, the third in a series of policy addresses laying out how he would govern.
Aides to the president expressed confidence in the voter turnout organization they have spent years building. Jim Messina, the president’s campaign manager, said the Democratic effort is outperforming the 2008 campaign in many places. He predicted that turnout among young people and minorities is likely to be higher than most people expect. A new ad released Tuesday night shows Mr. Romney’s closing statement from the last debate, arguing that voters have a choice between “two very different paths” for the country. “The president’s path means 20 million people out of work, struggling for a good job,” he says. “I’ll get people back to work with 12 million new jobs.”
And Mr. Obama’s advisers dismissed concerns about polls showing the race tightening. They said they always expected that to happen and that the large number of public polls created an “illusion of volatility” in the race. The campaign is also mulling whether to expand distribution of the 10-minute biographical video it first showed to rave reviews at the Republican National Convention, or to buy time for a similar biographical commercial in swing states, said two senior strategists, who had participated in those internal deliberations.
“We have the ball. We have the lead. We have a great push-off as a result of these last two very strong debate performances,” Mr. Axelrod said. “I’m just telling you guys: We know what we know and they know what they know.” Democrats monitoring Republican ad spending said the Romney campaign had begun asking individual television stations about the possibility of buying time for a long commercial.
He added: “We will know who’s bluffing in two weeks.”

Ashley Parker contributed reporting from Henderson, Nev., Jeff Zeleny from Columbus, Ohio, and Jim Rutenberg from New York.

Before leaving Florida Tuesday morning, Mr. Obama urged his supporters to go to the polls on Saturday, when early voting in the state begins. Seeking to blunt criticism that he has not been specific about proposals he would pursue in second term, he held up a newly printed brochure of his jobs and education plans, and pronounced that his “math adds up.”
“Compare my plan to Governor Romney’s,” Mr. Obama said.
He then delivered a no-holds-barred assault on Mr. Romney, accusing his Republican rival of changing his positions so many times that he needed Obamacare to cover his pre-existing condition of “Romnesia.”