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| Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney boards his campaign plane in Denver, Thursday, Oct. 4, 2012. |
DENVER (AP) -- Buoyed by a powerful debate showing, Mitt Romney said Thursday he offers "prosperity that comes through freedom" to a country struggling to shed a weak economy. President Barack Obama accused the former Massachusetts governor of running from his own record in pursuit of political power.
Both men unleashed new attack
ads in the battleground states in a race with little more than a month
to run, Obama suggesting Romney couldn't be trusted with the presidency,
and the Republican accusing the president of backing a large tax
increase on the middle class.
The debate
reached 67.2 million viewers, an increase of 28 percent over the first
debate in the 2008 presidential campaign. The measurement and
information company Nielsen said Thursday that 11 networks provided live
coverage of the debate.
Not even Democrats
disputed that Romney was likely to benefit politically from the debate
Wednesday night in which he aggressively challenged Obama's stewardship
of the economy and said his own plans would help pull the country out of
a slow-growth rut. Still, there was no immediate indication that the
race would expand beyond the nine battleground states where the rivals
and their running mates spend nearly all of their campaign time and
advertising dollars.
Debate host Colorado is
one of them, and Virginia, where Romney headed for an evening speech, is
another. So, too, Wisconsin, Obama's destination for a mid-day rally.
Nevada, Ohio, Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida and North Carolina are the
others.
Among them, the nine states account
for 110 electoral votes out of the 270 needed to win the White House,
more than enough to tip the campaign to one man or the other.
"Victory
is in sight," Romney exulted in an emailed request for donations to
supporters. It was a show of confidence by a man hoping for a quick
reversal in pre-debate public opinion polls that showed him trailing in
battleground states as well as nationally.
Reprising
a line from the debate, he told an audience of conservatives in Denver
that Obama offers "trickle-down government." He added, "I don't think
that's what America believes in. I see instead a prosperity that comes
through freedom."
Another possible pivot point
in the campaign neared in the form of Friday's government report on
unemployment for September. Joblessness was measured at 8.1. percent the
previous month.
Obama campaigned with the
energy of a man determined to make up for a subpar debate showing.
Speaking to a crowd not far from the debate hall, he said mockingly that
a "very spirited fellow" who stood next to him onstage Wednesday night
"does not want to be held accountable for the real Mitt Romney's
positions" on taxes, education and other issues. "Governor Romney may
dance around his positions, but if you want to be president you owe the
American people the truth," he said.
Later,
before a crowd of tens of thousands in Madison, Wis., he said Romney
wants to cut federal funding for Public Television while repealing
legislation that regulates the banking industry "I just want to make
sure I've got this straight: He'll get rid of regulations on Wall
Street, but he's going to crack down on Sesame Street," Obama said.
Taxes
were a particular point of contention between the two men, although
they were sharply divided as well on steps the cut the deficit, on
government regulation, on education and Medicare.
Both
in the debate and on the day after, Obama said repeatedly that his
rival favors a $5 trillion tax cut that is tilted to the wealthy and
would mean tax increases on the middle class or else result in a spike
in federal deficits.
Romney said it wasn't so,
and counterattacked in a new television commercial. It cited a report
by the American Enterprise Institute that said Obama and "his liberal
allies" want to raise taxes on middle class earners by $4,000 and that
the Republican alternative would not raise the amount they owe to the
IRS.
Romney has refused so far to disclose
many of the details to support his assertion that his proposal would not
lead to a tax cut. His ad was an attempt to parry a report by the Tax
Policy Center that Obama has frequently tried used to political
advantage, as he did again during the day.
In a
new ad by the president's campaign, Romney is quoted as saying that a
$5 trillion tax cut "is not my plan." The ad then cites a study by the
Tax Policy Center as saying it is, and asks why the Republican
challenger "won't level with us about his tax plan which gives the
wealthy huge new tax breaks.
"Because if we
can't trust him here" - a photo of the debate stage appears - "How could
we ever trust him here," the narrator says as a photo of the Oval
Office fills the screen.
The two men debate twice more this month, Oct. 16 in Hempstead, N.Y. and Oct. 22 in Boca Raton, Fla.
Before
they do, Vice President Joe Biden and Romney's running mate, Wisconsin
Rep. Paul Ryan, will share a stage in Danville, Ky. in one week's time.
Biden
plunged into the tax debate during the day, saying the administration
does indeed want to increase the taxes paid by the wealthy by $1
trillion.
"We want to let that trillion-dollar
tax cut expire so the middle class doesn't have to bear the burden of
all that money going to the super wealthy," he said while campaigning in
Iowa. "That's not a tax raise, that's called fairness where I come
from."
Republicans didn't see it that way, and seized on the comment as evidence the administration's policies would kill jobs.
Whatever
the eventual outcome of the race, Romney seemed to have achieved his
goal of a campaign reset. Democrats braced for tightening polls over the
next several days in the states where the campaign will be won or lost.
The
head of one Republican-aligned independent group said all such
organizations should consider expanding into states that have
effectively been written off. "If we didn't get a home run, we certainly
got a triple" from Romney's showing in the debate, said American Future
Fund's founder Nick Ryan, who sided with Rick Santorum during the
primaries.
Obama campaign strategist David
Axelrod acknowledged in a conference call with reporters that an
adjustment in strategy would be needed in the debates to come.
"Obviously moving forward we're going to take a hard look at this, and
we're going to have to make some judgments as to where to draw the line
in these debates and how to use our time," Axelrod said.
Romney
frequently interrupted both Obama and moderator Jim Lehrer of the
Public Broadcasting Service during the 90-minute debate, sometimes
talking over one or both of them to argue that the president's policies
hadn't restored the economy, or alternatively, that the president was
making false accusations about Republican proposals.
While
both men prepared extensively for their first head-to-head encounter,
Romney had the advantage of having taken part in 19 debates with his
Republican rivals over the course of many months. He seemed to employ
many of the techniques that he honed then, insisting on speaking time he
claimed he was entitled to, for example, generally without seeming
belligerent.
The president's last prior debate was four years ago, when he was running against Sen. John McCain.
