Obama, Romney trade job barbs in swing states

US: US President Barack Obama takes his campaign to the Rocky Mountain state of Colorado Sunday as he and Republican challenger Mitt Romney fight for votes in key battleground states that will determine the outcome of the November election. The president was on a four-day trip through swing states in the lead-up to his re-nomination at the Democrats’ meeting in North Carolina.

On Monday, he will travel to Louisiana to tour damage in the wake of Hurricane Isaac, which forced the Republican convention to start a day late. He will visit Virginia on Tuesday.

Gearing up for next week’s Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, Obama on Saturday rallied supporters in Iowa, a Midwestern state that helped launch his successful 2008 White House campaign. He mocked this week’s Republican gathering in Tampa, Florida for promoting an outdated policy agenda from the “last century” heavy on conservative social policies.

“It was a rerun. We’ve seen it before. You might as well have watched it on a black and white TV,” Obama joked to supporters in Urbandale.

“Let me recap it for you: Everything’s bad, it’s Obama’s fault and governor Romney is the only one who knows the secret to creating jobs and (making) the economy” grow.

He lambasted Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, for failing to offer any new ideas in his address to Republican activists.

Instead, Romney reiterated “the same old policies that have been sticking it to the middle class for years,” Obama said. “They talked a lot about me. They talked a lot about him, but they didn’t say much about you.” Speaking in Sioux City at a later rally, the president criticized Romney for having “nothing to say” about Afghanistan, where US troops have been fighting the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies for nearly 11 years.

In the meantime, campaigning in the crucial battleground state of Ohio, Romney said Obama had failed to fulfill his promise to revamp the sagging US economy, comparing his record to that of a failing sports coach. He noted that 23 million people are now out of work or have stopped looking for work or are underemployed in the United States.

AFP