Romney, VP pick Ryan hit campaign trail

US: Mitt Romney and newly minted running mate Paul Ryan will try to energize supporters in North Carolina Sunday after they hit the road on a bus tour across must-win US states, selling themselves as the duo who can "save the American dream." Fresh from a surprise early morning rollout of Romney's vice presidential pick in Norfolk, Virginia, the Republican pair struck out across the state pushing a policy of fiscal responsibility and savaging President Barack Obama as a job-killer bent on changing the country for the worse.

Romney's choise, cast as a bold move by his party, is sure to transform the presidential race less than three months before November's election, and the two men electrified crowds as they took to the stump.

The campaign also aims to sharply alter the trajectory of debate away from Romney's business record, taxes and image as an out-of-touch multimillionaire investor and toward larger wholesale issues such as how to revitalize the nation's sputtering economy.

"We can turn this thing around," Ryan, 42, told cheering supporters in Norfolk. "High unemployment, declining incomes and crushing debt is not a new normal. It's the result of misguided policies," the seven-term congressman said, in pointed criticism of Obama.

At subsequent stops, in Ashland and then Manassas, where the campaign said the rowdy crowd topped 8,000 people, the tip of Ryan's verbal spear grew sharper.

Obama has been pushing a "government-centered society with a government-run economy. It's not working. It's never worked before," Ryan said, rallying supporters in Manassas, outside the capital Washington.

"We were promised equal opportunity, not equal outcomes," he added to huge applause.

In recent weeks, Romney has slumped behind Obama in opinion polls, with the incumbent taking a clear lead nationally and in most of the dozen swing states that will decide the November 6 election.

A Fox News national poll out Thursday put Obama at 49 percent to Romney's 40, while a CNN poll had Obama at 52 percent, seven points up on the former Massachusetts governor.

But by picking Ryan, a favorite of small government conservatives, and embarking on a four-day bus tour across battleground states -- expanded to five to allow voters in Wisconsin to laud their native son on Sunday -- Romney hopes to gain the upper hand in the race.

The pair went on the offensive in Ashland, with Romney ominously criticizing Obama as "a president who's trying to change America... into something we might not recognize." He also blamed the Obama campaign for the bitterly negative tone of the race.

AFP