Biden takes a jab at Romney

TILTON, N.H. -- It's an opening salvo of the presidential campaign, minus actual presidential nominees.

Vice President Joe Biden unleashed a biting critique of Mitt Romney's policies Friday and the Republican came swiftly back at him -- a full-contact preview of what the general election might look like should Romney win the GOP nomination to challenge President Barack Obama.

All this before a vote is cast in the Republican race. The Iowa caucuses, looming Jan. 3, are the first step in the voting to pick a Republican nominee.

In an opinion piece published in The Des Moines Register, Biden portrayed the Republican front-runner as the purveyor of failed, retreaded economic ideas. Romney shot back that Biden and Obama live in an economic "fantasyland" out of touch with the real world.

Biden's jabs mark a major escalation in Obama's re-election campaign and refocus his political team on Romney, the former Massachusetts governor whom Obama advisers have long considered his most likely opponent.

And it switches Obama away from his just-concluded tax cut victory over House Republicans to the GOP presidential field just 12 days before the Iowa caucuses.

"Romney appears satisfied to settle for an economy in which fewer people succeed, while the majority of Americans are left to tread water or fall behind," Biden wrote.

The Obama team may be betting on Romney, but his Republican rivals were conceding no such ground.

Campaigning in South Carolina, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich derided Romney as a "Massachusetts moderate trying to come down and pretend to be a conservative. But I'm not going to say anything stronger than that. I'm going to focus on positive things."

Asked later how that wasn't being negative, Gingrich said: "I didn't criticize him. I described him accurately."

Rep. Michele Bachmann's campaign said Friday she would start radio and TV commercials in Iowa, her first since her straw poll victory in the state in August.

In them, she stresses her Christian values and that she's "an Iowa girl from Waterloo."