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| President Barack Obama gestures as speaks at a campaign event at Cornell College, Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2012, in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. The president sports a pink bracelet in honor of October being breast cancer awareness month. |
MOUNT VERNON,
Iowa (AP) -- One day after their contentious, finger-pointing
debate, President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney vied
aggressively for the support of women voters Wednesday, as they and
their running mates charged across nearly a half-dozen battleground
states in the close race for the White House with 20 days to run.
Not
even Republicans disputed that Obama's debate performance was much
stronger than the listless showing two weeks earlier that helped spark a
rise in the polls for Romney. The two rivals meet one more time, next
Monday in Florida.
The first post-debate polls
were divided, some saying Romney won, others finding Obama did. At
least some of the voters who asked the questions in the town-hall style
encounter remained uncommitted. "If Gov. Romney could actually provide
the jobs, that would be a good thing because we really need them," said
Nina Gonzalez, a 2008 Obama voter, neatly summarizing the uncertainty
confronting voters in a slow-growth, high-unemployment economy.
Obama
wore a pink wristband to show support for Breast Cancer Awareness Month
as he campaigned in Iowa and then Ohio, and reminded his audience that
the first legislation he signed after becoming president made it easier
for women to take pay grievances to court.
Romney
took no position on that bill when it passed Congress, and his campaign
says he would not seek its repeal. But Obama chided him, saying, "That
shouldn't be a complicated question. Equal pay for equal work."
He
also jabbed at Romney's remark during Tuesday night's debate that as
Massachusetts governor, he received "whole binders full of women" after
saying he wanted to appoint more of them to his administration. "We
don't have to collect a bunch of binders to find qualified, talented
women," he said.
Romney's campaign launched a
new television commercial that seemed designed to take the edge ever so
slightly off his opposition to abortion - another example of his October
move toward the middle - while urging women voters to keep pocketbook
issues uppermost in their minds when they cast their ballots.
"In
fact he thinks abortion should be an option in cases of rape, incest or
to save a mother's life," says a woman in the new ad. Pivoting quickly
to economic matters, she adds, "But I'm more concerned about the debt
our children will be left with. I voted for President Obama last time,
but we just can't afford four more years."
That dovetailed with Romney's personal pitch to an audience in Chesapeake, Va.
"This
president has failed American's women. They've suffered in terms of
getting jobs," he declared, saying that 3.6 million more of them are in
poverty now than when Obama took office.
With
recent gains in the polls for Romney, he and the president are locked in
an exceedingly close race as they shuttle from one critical state to
another and dispatch surrogates ranging from former President Bill
Clinton to ex-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to locations they
cannot make on their own.
A little less than
three weeks before Election Day, Obama appears on course to win states
and the District of Columbia that account for 237 of the 270 electoral
votes needed for victory. The same is true for Romney in states with 191
electoral votes.
The remaining 110 electoral
votes are divided among the hotly contested battleground states of
Florida (29), North Carolina (15), Virginia (13), New Hampshire (4),
Iowa (6), Colorado (9), Nevada (6), Ohio (18) and Wisconsin (10).
As
the campaign days dwindled down, the number of television commercials
rose higher. According to media buyers who track ads, target voters in
the area around Cleveland can expect to see an average of about 120 ads
next week paid for by the two candidates and groups supporting them -
more than 17 a day. There were similar, if somewhat less intense
campaign-by-commercials under way across all the battleground states.
In
many cases - Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Virginia, Nevada among them -
competitive races for the Senate and even House contests added to the
bombardment. So, too, campaign brochures, piling up in mailboxes earlier
than past elections because of widespread pre-election day voting.
There
was little mystery in the candidates' concentration on women voters. An
AP-GfK survey taken in mid-September, when Obama was leading in the
opinion polls, found that 8 percent of all likely votes were women who
were either undecided or said they might change their minds.
Polls
since the first debate two weeks ago show gains for Romney among women
voters, a shift that Obama can ill afford given the traditional
Republican advantage among men.
Democrats rebutted Romney's memory of the binders he received as the newly elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002.
On
a conference call arranged by the Democratic National Committee, a
former executive director of the Massachusetts Government Appointments
Project said the group provided the resumes of women qualified for
appointment unprompted. "To be perfectly clear, Mitt Romney did not
request" them, said Jesse Mermell.
Romney
quickly countered with a combination testimonial and fundraising appeal
from Kerry Healey, who was his lieutenant governor in Massachusetts. She
said he had named numerous women to his administration, adding, "He
sought out our counsel, and he listened to our advice. We didn't always
agree, but we were always respected."
Vice
President Joe Biden's first stop of the day was in Greeley, Colo., where
he mocked Romney on the same topic but in terms more pungent than
Obama's. "What I can't understand is how he's gotten into this sort of
1950s time warp in terms of women," Biden said. "The idea he had to go
and ask where a qualified woman was. He just should have come to my
house. He didn't need a binder."
Republican
Rep. Paul Ryan was in Berea, Ohio, where he said women were suffering
under the economy as the end of Obama's term nears. "Twenty-six million
women are trapped in poverty today. That's the highest rate in 17
years," he said. "We need to get people back to work."
In
a lighter moment, he stopped by the football practice facility of the
Cleveland Browns and lamented missing out on hunting season this fall.
"I've got this election thing going on," he told Pro Bowl tackle Joe
Thomas.
