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 tonight - something many of his supporters thought he did too little of in his first face-off with Romney.
Early voting is under way in dozens of states, giving the candidates little chance to recover from any slip-ups that come in these final days. Obama has been trying to get his supporters to lock in their choice now, and his campaign announced Monday that he and his wife, Michelle, would become the first president and first lady to cast their ballots early.
Obama planned to vote early during a visit to his home state of Illinois next week, while Michelle Obama told a rally in Delaware, Ohio, that she dropped her absentee ballot in the mail Monday. “For me, it was Election Day,” she said.
Authorities said two motorcycles collided while escorting the first lady after her stop in central Ohio, injuring a police officer and a state trooper.
The State Highway Patrol said the motorcycles somehow sideswiped each other late Monday afternoon east of Delaware as the motorcade headed to an airport.
A state trooper and a Genoa Township police officer were hurt in the crash. They were hospitalized in Columbus in stable condition.
Obama wasn’t hurt, and her motorcade continued on its route.
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.
GOP vice presidential nominee Rep. 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.”
Obama campaign spokesman Jennifer Psaki said the president would seek to run on his economic record, not away from it, during tonight’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 today 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.
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.
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.
A study out Monday said most Medicare recipients - 59 percent - would pay higher premiums under a hypothetical privatized system, with wide regional differences leading to big increases in some states.
In the senior-rich political swing state of Florida, the study said premiums for traditional Medicare would jump more than $200 a month.
The report by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation carries a prominent disclaimer that it should not be taken as an analysis of the proposal by Romney and Ryan, partly because their plan lacks specifics.
However, Kaiser said it is modeled a similar approach to Romney-Ryan.
The Obama campaign pounced on the findings, while the Romney camp pointed to the disclaimer, saying the report doesn’t reflect the candidate’s own plan.
Also Monday, Romney’s campaign announced it raised $170.4 million last month with the Republican Party, a little behind Obama’s $181 million September haul with the Democratic Party. Romney and the GOP had been raising more money than Obama and the Democrats by midsummer, but that changed last month. Both candidates are using their millions to expand campaign offices and flood airwaves with television ads in key states in the election’s final weeks.
Romney’s top-flight donors are meeting at New York’s 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.
Meanwhile, Romney’s campaign sued Wisconsin for purportedly delaying distribution of more than three dozen ballots for the Nov. 6 presidential election to civilians and military personnel overseas, asking a court to extend the deadline for all such ballots in the state.
Federal law mandates election officials must “transmit” absentee ballots to the military and other U.S. citizens living overseas “at least 45 days before a federal election,” Romney for President Inc. said in a complaint filed in federal court in Madison.
Wisconsin, a swing state, “failed to ensure that absentee ballots were sent to military and overseas voters who validly requested them” by the Sept. 22 deadline, the group said.
According to the complaint, some ballots were sent out as much as nine days late. Completed ballots must be received by election officials no later than 4 p.m. Nov. 9 to be counted.
The Romney group asked a federal judge to declare that the state violated the absentee ballot law and issue an injunction to extend deadlines for mailing ballots back to Wisconsin by at least five days, according to court papers filed Friday.
Reid Magney, spokesman for the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, didn’t immediately return a call for comment on the complaint.
Information for this article was contributed by Julie Pace, Nedra Pickler, Steve Peoples, Jack Gillum, Ken Thomas and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of The Associated Press; and by Phil Milford and Margaret Cronin Fisk of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/16/2012