Obama in Wisconsin to counter Ryan, ads

MILWAUKEE — President Barack Obama worked to squash GOP hopes for a resurgence of support in pivotal Wisconsin on Saturday, pushing back against his GOP rival’s complaints about an overly intrusive government. Mitt Romney countered with his own pitch to middle-class voters, saying the president had fostered a culture of “government dependency” that hinders upward mobility.

At a fundraiser in Milwaukee, Obama told supporters Saturday to dedicate their energy to voting for him and not disparaging Republicans.

“In the coming weeks, folks here in Wisconsin and across the country, people are going to have a very big choice to make,” Obama said. “Top-down economics never works.”

“No hissing or booing,” he said when someone from the audience expressed displeasure with Republican policies. “Just voting.”

With just six weekends left before Election Day, both men were devoting considerable time to raising campaign cash to bankroll the deluge of ads already saturating hotly contested states.

Baseball great Hank Aaron supplied the star power at Obama’s Milwaukee fundraisers.

“As one who wore the No. 44 on his back for decades, I ask you to join me in helping the 44th president of the United States hit a grand slam,” said Aaron.

Romney, who is expected to launch a more aggressive campaign schedule in the coming week, hunted for West Coast cash, if not votes, at a private fundraiser near San Diego and headed for another in Los Angeles. Some Republicans have grumbled that he’s not spending enough time with voters in swing states, and Romney seemed to take note of that sentiment.

“I’ve got good news: This is the last fundraiser in San Diego,” Romney told supporters. “I’m not even going to be able to go home today. We’re just coming to town to see you and keep the campaign going. It’s nonstop.”

Romney adviser Kevin Madden said the GOP nominee would begin “a really intense battleground state schedule.” The former Massachusetts governor will campaign in Colorado, Ohio and Virginia in the coming week.

With running mates Joe Biden and Paul Ryan campaigning in New England and Florida, respectively, the presidential campaign was spread far and wide - both geographically and strategically. Biden revved up union activists poised to canvass for votes in New Hampshire while Ryan appealed to Hispanic voters in Miami and talked space policy in Orlando.

It was Obama’s first visit to Wisconsin since February, and the president was intent on shoring up support in Ryan’s home state. Obama won Wisconsin easily in 2008, but Ryan is popular there and recent polls have Obama up by single digits. The GOP showed its organizational strength in fending off efforts to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker, but Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said Democrats “continue to have a strategic advantage,” with more field offices and political infrastructure in the state.

With absentee voting already under way in the state, first lady Michelle Obama will be campaigning there this week.

Obama made the case against Romney before a crowd at the Milwaukee Theater, countering Romney’s call to change Washington from the inside with an appeal to voters to help him break through partisan gridlock with pressure on Congress from the outside. He said that despite economic troubles, his administration has made progress and has made “practical and specific” proposals to create jobs.

“The choice now is do we reverse this,” he said.

Romney, in his weekly podcast, said the government’s role should be “very different” from what Obama wants to provide.

“Under President Obama, we have a stagnant economy that fosters government dependency,” he said. “My policies will create a growing economy that fosters upward mobility.”

In advance of Obama’s visit, Romney’s campaign made the argument that Obama’s failure to turn around the economy had Wisconsin voters looking for a different path. Walker said the president had a “Wisconsin problem.” The state’s 7.5 percent unemployment rate is below the national average, but its manufacturing industry has been hit hard in recent years.

Romney’s campaign, along with pro-Romney supercommittees, had run a total of 7,727 advertisements in Wisconsin through Sept. 17, compared with 1,577 ads for Obama, according to a review of data from NewYork-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, which tracks advertising. Together the opponents have spent about $4.6 million on political commercials.

“The ads have been hot and heavy,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “After Ryan was picked, that put us into battleground status.”

The Republican National Committee released a Web video, “Since You’ve Been Gone,” highlighting recent GOP organizing efforts in the state and Walker’s recall-election victory.

However, Messina saw good signs all over, saying, “We’re either tied or in the lead in every battleground state 45 days out. I think you will see a tightening in the national polls going forward.”

Meanwhile, Romney said his campaign doesn’t need an overhaul even though he has come under fire from members of his own party over recent stumbles.

“It doesn’t need a turnaround,” Romney said in an interview for CBS’s 60 Minutes program. “We’ve got a campaign which is tied with an incumbent president.”

An excerpt from the interview, scheduled for broadcast today, was released by the network Friday. Obama also has been interviewed for the program.

“There are some days we’re up. There are some days we’re down,” Romney said of poll results.

Romney has been criticized by some Republicans as well as Democrats for his initial response to the deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya and his remarks to donors, secretly recorded in a video, in which he said 47 percent of Americans are government-dependent “victims” who don’t pay federal income taxes.

“That’s not the campaign. That was me, right?” Romney said in the 60 Minutes interview. The campaign organization is doing a “very good job. But not everything I say is elegant. And, and I want to make it very clear, I want to help 100 percent of the American people.”

Ryan, campaigning in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, reinforced Romney’s argument that Obama hasn’t been able to make needed changes in Washington, poking at the president’s recent comment that it’s hard to change Washington from the inside without mobilizing public pressure on Congress from the outside.

“Why do we send presidents to the White House in the first place?” Ryan asked. “We send presidents to change and fix the mess in Washington, and if this president has admitted that he can’t change Washington, then you know what? We need to change presidents.”

He also faulted Obama for a “policy of appeasement” toward the Castro regime in Cuba, saying all the president had done was “reward more despotism.”

As a young congressman from rural Wisconsin, Ryan previously supported ending the trade embargo with Cuba, an unpopular sentiment among many Republicans and Cuban exiles in Florida, one of the most crucial swing states in the general election.

Saturday morning Ryan appeared alongside a powerhouse lineup of Florida Republicans, including former Gov. Jeb Bush, at the Versailles Restaurant, long famous as a gathering place for the anti-Castro movement.

“You learn from friendships,” Ryan told the crowd at Versailles, explaining that his Florida friends in Congress had shown him “just how brutal the Castro regime is, just how this president’s policy of appeasement is not working.”

Ryan argues that the Obama administration has been too willing to engage with Cuba and has made it too easy to travel back and forth and send money to Havana from the United States. He vowed that a Romney-Ryan administration would be “tough on Castro” as well as on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

An Obama campaign official took issue with Ryan’s characterization of the administration’s Cuba policy, saying that Obama “has repeatedly renewed the trade embargo with Cuba, pressured the Castro regime to give its people more of a say in their own future, and supported democracy movements on the island.”

The official also said that the administration had “put in place common-sense, family based reforms that allow Cuban-Americans to visit their family members still living in Cuba.”

In an appearance in Orlando, not far from Florida’s space coast, Ryan criticized the president for putting the U.S. space program “on a path where we are conceding our global position as the unequivocal leader in space.” The Obama campaign responded that Ryan has proposed deep cuts in spending for space exploration.

Underscoring the importance of grass-roots efforts in the campaign’s final days, Biden rallied union workers at a Teamsters union hall in Manchester, N.H., saying their organizing work would be the “antidote” to millions spent on advertising by richly funded Republican political action committees.

Biden said it was because of unions that the U.S. has a strong middle class, and he accused Romney and Ryan of having “a completely different value set, a completely different vision.”

“They’re doubling down on everything that caused the economic crisis in the first place,” he said.

Romney was dedicating most of the weekend to courting donors in California - a state that he’s not trying to win. He attended a private fundraiser in suburban San Francisco on Friday night and planned to attend at least two more Saturday in San Diego and Los Angeles.

The GOP nominee is feeling fundraising pressure: Last month, for the first time in four months, Obama and the Democratic Party raised more than Romney and the Republican Party, $114 million to $111.6 million.

Information for this article was contributed by Jim Kuhnhenn, Nancy Benac, Jennifer Kay, Steve Peoples, and Holly Ramer of The Associated Press; by Hans Nichols, Julianna Goldman, Lisa Lerer and Ian Katz of Bloomberg News; and by Richard A. Oppel Jr. of The New York Times.