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US President Barack Obama is pictured on stage during a campaign rally at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia yesterday |
Each heads to one of the hotly contested political battleground states just 18 days before an election that by all accounts is on a knife edge.
The president stumps for votes in Virginia, where he holds a grassroots event, while Romney flies to the largest swing state of all, Florida, to hold a rally with running mate Paul Ryan.
Obama won both states in 2008, but as a measure of the tightness of this year’s contest, the two are now up for grabs, with Florida leaning toward Romney, according to a poll average by Washington website RealClearPolitics. Romney will be greeted with encouraging news when he arrives: an endorsement by the Orlando Sentinel. “We have little confidence that Obama would be more successful managing the economy and the budget in the next four years,” the newspaper’s editors wrote. “For that reason, though we endorsed him in 2008, we are recommending Romney in this race.”
Obama has come in for Republican criticism for failing to lay out just what he would do in the next four years to improve the struggling US economy.
Romney has a five-point plan, but Democrats contend he has been light on specifics. The candidates will no doubt return to the lacerating jibes that have marked the last several months, after they managed to find fleeting respite from the heated rhetoric in New York city. The two embraced biting sarcasm and self-deprecation Thursday night at the fabled Al Smith Memorial Dinner, where Obama mocked his own “nap” in the first debate and Romney took aim at his extraordinary wealth.
The tuxedo-wearing candidates sat at the top table of the glittering affair, separated only by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, just two days after their latest acrimonious debate. Romney’s debut zinger took a shot at his own wealth, saying it was nice for him and wife Ann, resplendent in a black and white dress with a cape, to slip into clothes they would wear around the house. His speech, perhaps with more of a cutting edge than Obama’s later remarks, joked that his challenger had come up with a new slogan after good employment data this month: “You’re better off now than you were four weeks ago.”
Obama and Romney had earlier greeted one other with smiles and handshakes, but the reality of a closely contested race simmered below the surface.
The president also started out in self deprecating tone, noting he had shown more energy in their second debate on Tuesday, than in his disastrous first effort two weeks ago. AFP
President says mind-changing rival has ‘Romnesia’
President Barack Obama came up with a biting new term yesterday for what he called rival Mitt Romney’s flip-flopping on policy positions, calling it “Romnesia.” “Mr Severely Conservative wants you to think he was severely kidding about everything he said over the last year,” the president said at a rally attended by some 9,000 people at a university campus outside Washington. It marked a clear escalation of the tone Obama is employing to attack his rival in the tight race for the White House, with the election just 18 days away.
The two men face off Monday in Florida for the last of three debates, this time focusing on foreign policy.
The president said the former Massachusetts governor used to claim, for instance, he was the ideal candidate for the conservative movement known as the Tea Party. “Now, suddenly, he’s saying, ‘what, who, me?’” the president said, drawing laughs from the crowd.
“I mean, he’s changing up so much and backtracking and sidestepping, we’ve got to name this condition that he’s going through. I think it’s called ‘Romnesia.’ That’s what it’s called. I think that’s what he’s going through,” Obama said.
The president then rattled off what he said were a series of Romney policy reversals on issues such as women’s rights, tax cuts for the wealthy and the future of the coal industry.
Shortly after Obama’s speech, the hashtag #Romnesia began trending on Twitter.