Obama, Romney zero in on battlegrounds

President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney concentrated on politically competitive states Saturday, with Obama accusing his Republican challenger of running on a "rerun agenda" while Romney pressed voters to fire the incumbent who he said has failed to create U.S. jobs.

Kicking off a series of stops leading into this week's Democratic National Convention, Obama told Iowa voters that when he formally accepts his party's nomination to a second term on Thursday, he'll offer "a better path forward" for improving the economy than have the Republicans. The president said that Romney and other Republicans provided no new ideas to help middle-class Americans last week at the party's national convention in Tampa, Fla.

"What they offered over those three days was more often than not an agenda that was better suited for the last century," Obama said at Living History Farms in Urbandale. "You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV."

Romney, speaking to about 3,000 voters at the Union Terminal in Cincinnati on the opening Saturday of the college football season, likened Obama to a coach who's had a losing season.

"If you have a coach that's zero and 23 million, you say it's time to get a new coach," Romney said, referring to the number of unemployed and underemployed in the nation. "It's time for America to see a winning season again, and we're going to bring it to them."

With fewer than 70 days until Election Day, Obama, 51, and Romney, 65, have zeroed in on fewer than a dozen battleground states. After Iowa, the president plans stops over the next few days in Colorado, Ohio and Virginia before flying to Charlotte, N.C., to accept renomination. The five states combined, all won by Obama four years ago, hold 61 of the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House.

Romney will spend this week starting to prepare for his October debates against Obama, campaign strategist Kevin Madden told reporters yesterday. The former Massachusetts governor will huddle in Vermont with advisers including Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, a veteran of debate preparation for Republican presidential nominees, to get ready for the three faceoffs, Madden said.

Asked whether the campaign was concerned about the prospect that Romney would surrender the media spotlight to Obama during the Democratic convention if he took a break from campaigning, Madden said: "We've spent a good deal of time on the campaign trail. We'll still have surrogates out." Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan will stump in North Carolina, Madden added.

Romney told supporters in Cincinnati he expects the Democratic gathering starting Tuesday in North Carolina will be a more somber affair than the Tampa event.

"They're going to be having a convention, I guess, in Charlotte next week, and it's not going to be as happy as ours was," Romney said.

Later, appearing with Ryan in Jacksonville, Fla., Romney asked supporters to find voters who backed Obama in 2008 and persuade them to abandon him, contending that the president failed to keep promises he made four years ago.

"Each one of you needs to find one person who voted for Barack Obama and convince them to vote for Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney," he told a rally on the St. John's River.

Ryan said while Obama "inherited a difficult situation when he came into office," he has "made things worse" and broken his promises. "We're not better off, we're worse off," Ryan said.

Obama sought to deflect criticism about campaign promises in Urbandale by contrasting his stance on national security with Romney's. "Governor Romney had nothing to say about Afghanistan" in his convention speech, Obama said.

Romney also has said "ending the war in Iraq was tragic," the president said. "I said we'd end that war, and we did. I said we'd take out bin Laden and we did," Obama said, referring to the raid last year that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.