Campaigns at full throttle

Obama and Romney set torrid pace

President Barack Obama (top) strides onto the stage as former President Bill Clinton applauds during a campaign event at State Capitol Square in Concord, N.H., on Sunday.
President Barack Obama (top) strides onto the stage as former President Bill Clinton applauds during a campaign event at State Capitol Square in Concord, N.H., on Sunday.

— Two days from judgment by the voters, President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney raced across competitive battleground states on Sunday, stressing differences on the economy, health care and more while professing a willingness to work across party lines to end gridlock in Washington.

“You have the power,” Obama told thousands of cheering supporters in New Hampshire.

Boos from Romney’s partisans in Cleveland turned to appreciative laughter when the Republican nominee began a sentence by saying, “If the president were to be elected,” and ended it with, “It’s possible but not likely.”

After a campaign that began more than a year ago, late public opinion polls were tight for the nationwide popular vote. But they suggested an advantage for the president in the state by-state competition for electoral votes, which will settle the contest.

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AP

Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney pray before his arrival at a campaign rally Sunday in Cleveland.

Conceding nothing, Romney set his first foray of the fall into Pennsylvania. The state last voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 1988, but the challenger and his allies began advertising heavily in the campaign’s final days.

The theme from Rocky blared from the loudspeakers as he stepped to the podium. “The people of America understand we’re taking back the White House because we’re going to win Pennsylvania,” Romney said.

Earlier, Romney launched a new television commercial as he appeared in Iowa, Ohio and Virginia as well as Pennsylvania. “He’s offering excuses. I’ve got a plan” to fix the economy. “I can’t wait for us to get started,” he said.

White House senior adviser David Plouffe described Romney’s push in Pennsylvania as a “desperate ploy at the end of the campaign” on ABC’s This Week. Republican aides insist the state is in play, casting their late push as a sign that their campaign has momentum and can compete in areas Democrats assumed they would win handily.

“This is one of those states that came into view after the first debate,” Romney spokesman Kevin Madden told reporters on his campaign plane. “We see it as a great opportunity.”

In Des Moines, Romney said he would meet regularly with “good men and women on both sides of the aisle” in Congress. Later, in Cleveland, he said of Obama, “Instead of bridging the divide, he’s made it wider.”

Obama had New Hampshire, Florida, Ohio and Colorado in his sights for the day.

In Florida, the president said he wants to work across party lines, but quickly added there were limits to the sorts of compromises he would make.

“If the price of peace in Washington is cutting deals that will kick students off of financial aid, or get rid of funding for Planned Parenthood, or let insurance companies discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions, or eliminate health care for millions who are on Medicaid ... I’m not willing to pay that price,” he said, reciting some of the charges he has leveled against Romney.

Flanked by former President Bill Clinton in the shadow of the New Hampshire Capitol in Concord, Obama vowed to continue efforts to improve a recovering economy.

A conservative group cited a string of surveys that favor the president as it e-mailed an urgent plea for late-campaign donations so it could end his time in the White House.

The two rivals and their running mates flew from state to state as the last of an estimated 1 million campaign commercials were airing in a costly attempt to influence a diminishing pool of voters.

Obama planned pre-Election Day stops in Wisconsin, Ohio and Iowa today and is expected to head home to Chicago on Tuesday to watch election returns from his campaign headquarters. Romney’s plans for today included events in Florida, Virginia, Ohio and New Hampshire.

More than 27 million ballots have been cast in 34 states and the District of Columbia, although none will be counted until Election Day on Tuesday.

Nearly 4 million of them were deposited by Floridians, and Democrats cited unprecedented demand for pre-Election Day voting as they filed a lawsuit demanding an extension of available time.

As they did about almost everything else in the campaign, aides to Obama and Romney disagreed about the political significance of the early voting.

“Early voting is going very well for us,” said Plouffe, adding a prediction on This Week that the president will win a second term on Tuesday.

But Rich Beeson, Romney’s political director, said that “they are under performing and we are over performing” in terms of turning out early and absentee votes compared with 2008. Romney and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan “will be elected the next president and vice president of the United States,” he predicted on Fox News Sunday.

Obama and Romney disagree sharply about the approach the nation should take to the slow-growth economy and high unemployment, and the differences have helped define the campaign. Most notably, Romney wants to extend tax cuts that are due to expire without exception, while Obama wants to allow them to expire on incomes over $250,000.

At the same time, polls show bipartisanship is popular, in the abstract, at least, which accounts for the emphasis the candidates are placing in the race’s final days on working across political aisles.

Romney frequently cites his ability to work with the Democratic-controlled Legislature while he was governor of Massachusetts, although he rarely mentions the veto battles he had.

Obama’s term has been littered with the legislative wreckage left behind by constant struggles with congressional Republicans. Yet his trip to New Jersey last Wednesday was a model of nonpartisanship as he accompanied Republican Gov. Chris Christie on a tour of destruction caused by Hurricane Sandy. The governor repeatedly praised the administration’s response to the storm.

One prominent Republican said the storm had worked to Romney’s disadvantage in a different way.

“The hurricane is what broke Romney’s momentum. I don’t think there’s any question about it,” former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said on CNN’s State of the Union.

Romney’s campaign wanted no part of that. “I don’t look at what happened with the storm and how it affected so many people through a political lens,” said Madden.

So intense was the campaigning Sunday that Vice President Joe Biden’s plane and the one carrying Romney were both on the tarmac in Cleveland at the same time in early afternoon. The two men did not see each another.

Biden’s assignment for the day was to rally voters across Ohio. “These guys are trying to play a con game here at the end,” he said of Romney and Ryan, whom he accused of posing as more moderate than they are.

Ryan started out in his home state of Wisconsin. He donned a Green Bay Packers jacket and a yellow-and-green striped tie for a pregame tailgating party he attended briefly across the street from Lambeau Field.

Then, football or no football, it was off to Ohio, Minnesota and Colorado.

Information for this article was contributed by David Espo, Steve Peoples, Julie Pace, Kasie Hunt, Matthew Daly, Phil Elliott, Beth Fouhy and Josh Lederman of The Associated Press; by Michael D. Shear, Mark Landler and Ashley Parker of The New York Times; and by Lisa Lerer, James Rowley, Alexander Kowalski and Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/05/2012

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