Obama derides his ‘last century’ rivals as Romney targets deficit

Meanwhile Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney looked to capitalise on a newly energised party fresh from its three-day convention in Tampa, Florida, where a parade of speakers blasted Mr Obama’s handling of the economy, struggling in the weakest recession recovery of the post-war era.

Both candidates are criss-crossing the US, each day adding to the sense of urgency in a presidential contest that has remained tight since Mr Romney clinched the nomination in April.

The economy has been the top-rated issue in opinion polls all year, and the president is eager to turn the focus on to Mr Romney.

Mr Obama said in Urbandale, Iowa: “Despite all the challenges that we face in this new century, what they (the Republicans) offered over those three days was, more often than not, an agenda that was better suited for the last century.

“It was a re-run. We’d seen it before. You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV.”

Republicans “will take us backwards”, Mr Obama said, to the age of “trickle-down, you’re on your own” economics that begin with tax cuts for the rich but tax increases for the middle class.

Mr Romney campaigned in Ohio during the day – the opening of the college football season – and proclaimed it was time the country had a winning season after years of a sluggish economy and high unemployment. In front of his own cheering crowd at Cincinnati’s Union Terminal, he pledged to cut the national deficit and “get us on track for a balanced budget”.

But Mr Romney has yet to produce a budget for public inspection. Nor did he mention that, as chairman of the House of Representatives Budget Committee, his running mate, Paul Ryan, wrote a plan projecting the deficit would decline each year from 2013 through 2017, but then begin an inexorable rise again.

Additionally, the national debt is projected to rise each year, from a current level of nearly $16 trillion (£10tn) to an estimated $25 trillion (£15.8tn) at the end of 2022.

Both Mr Romney and Mr 
Ryan focused their attention on Ohio, a linchpin in Mr Romney’s strategy. No Republican has won the White House without carrying the Midwestern battleground state.

In turn, no Democrat has won without winning Ohio since John F Kennedy in 1960.

Mr Obama’s trip, billed as “The Road to Charlotte”, will take him through the battleground states of Iowa, Colorado, Ohio and 
Virginia, four states that he carried in 2008 but remain at the top of Mr Romney’s wish list for the November 6 election.

Mr Obama made a brief detour to foreign policy in his speech at his first stop in Iowa. “Governor Romney had nothing to say about Afghanistan this week or the plans for the 33,000 troops who will have come home from the war by the end of this month,” he said.

[Mr Romney] “said ending the war in Iraq was tragic. I said we’d end that war and we did”, Mr Obama said.

Mr Romney had said late last year, in a veterans’ round-table: “The precipitous withdrawal is unfortunate. It’s more than unfortunate, I think it’s tragic.

“It puts at risk many of the victories that were hard won by the men and women who served there.”

Mr Obama, pointing to successes, declared: “I said we’d take out bin Laden and we did.”

His audience cheered the mention of the demise of the architect of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks, who was killed in his hideout in Pakistan by US Navy special operations forces last year, in a raid ordered by Mr Obama.

Polls make Iowa one of eight or so battleground states where the election is most likely to be decided. The president carried Iowa in 2008, and in an indication of the struggle he now faces, he has been lavishing time on it in recent weeks.

Presidents are not chosen by a nationwide popular vote but in state-by-state contests.