After a one-night truce that saw President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney trade jokes at a charity dinner, the two dashed back onto the trail Friday before prepping for their third and final debate.
Each heads to one of the hotly contested political battleground states just 18 days before an election that by all accounts is on a knife edge.
The president stumps for votes in Virginia, where he holds a grassroots event, while Romney flies to the largest swing state of all, Florida, to hold a rally with running mate Paul Ryan.
Obama won both states in 2008, but as a measure of the tightness of this year’s contest, the two are now up for grabs, with Florida leaning toward Romney, according to a poll average by Washington website RealClearPolitics.
Romney will be greeted with encouraging news when he arrives Friday: an endorsement by the Orlando Sentinel.
“We have little confidence that Obama would be more successful managing the economy and the budget in the next four years,” the newspaper’s editors wrote. “For that reason, though we endorsed him in 2008, we are recommending Romney in this race.”
Obama has come in for Republican criticism for failing to lay out just what he would do in the next four years to improve the struggling US economy.
Romney has a five-point plan, but Democrats contend he has been light on specifics.
The candidates will no doubt return to the lacerating jibes that have marked the last several months, after they managed to find fleeting respite from the heated rhetoric in New York city.
The two embraced biting sarcasm and self-deprecation Thursday night at the fabled Al Smith Memorial Dinner, where Obama mocked his own “nap” in the first debate and Romney took aim at his extraordinary wealth.
The tuxedo-wearing candidates sat at the top table of the glittering affair, separated only by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, just two days after their latest acrimonious debate.
Romney’s debut zinger took a shot at his own wealth, saying it was nice for him and wife Ann, resplendent in a black and white dress with a cape, to slip into clothes they would wear around the house.
His speech, perhaps with more of a cutting edge than Obama’s later remarks, joked that his challenger had come up with a new slogan after good employment data this month: “You’re better off now than you were four weeks ago.”
Obama and Romney had earlier greeted one other with smiles and handshakes, but the reality of a closely contested race simmered below the surface.
The president also started out in self deprecating tone, noting he had shown more energy in their second debate on Tuesday, than in his disastrous first effort two weeks ago.
“I was really well rested after the nice long nap I had in the first debate!” Obama joked.
He also noted that the unemployment rate, now at 7.8 percent, was at the lowest point of his presidency before adding: “I don’t have a joke here, I just thought it’d be useful to remind everybody.”
But as is traditional at the dinner, in memory of former New York governor Smith, the first Roman Catholic to run for president, in 1928, Obama and Romney both praised one another as honorable family men.
Obama’s performance at the second debate, in Long Island on Tuesday, steadied supporters reduced to panic after the first showdown.
But there was bad polling news Thursday to further rattle Democrats as Obama slipped seven points behind Romney in Gallup’s daily national tracking poll.
The former Massachusetts governor led 52 to 45 percent among voters likely to cast ballots in the November 6 election.
But in two swing states crucial to Obama’s hopes of reelection, the president was holding firm; he led 51-43 percent in Iowa and 51-45 in Wisconsin.
If Obama picked up those two and added bellwether Ohio to the list of safe states in his column, he would be assured a second term.
Obama and Romney will meet in their last debate, in Florida on Monday, to discuss foreign policy, and Obama said he was already looking forward to confronting the Republican on Iraq.
“You know … he said that it was tragic the way I ended the war in Iraq. Last week he said we should still have troops in Iraq,” Obama said at a rally in New Hampshire.
Obama will hunker down at Camp David for weekend debate prep, while Romney will do the same, in Florida.
Truce over, Obama and Romney hit trail anew
