Quotes of the day

A space of only five minutes revealed a lot about the aggressive new phase an increasingly confident Mitt Romney is entering.

In a poke at President Barack Obama, the Republican challenger timed a speech in Ohio on the economy to begin just minutes before his Democratic rival gave a major address on the same topic in the same battleground state…

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Breaking from his habit of playing it safe with his media appearances, he will appear on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday and is likely to speak to other television networks he has avoided in recent weeks.

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Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s guerrilla tactics continued Thursday, as the campaign bus circled the venue where President Barack Obama will be speaking this afternoon.

As it passed the assembled throngs of supporters awaiting entry to the event at Cuyahoga Community College, the bus honked its horn dozens of times, before circling around to do it again. Obama supporters jeered and booed each time the bus passed the line outside of the security screening area…

An Obama campaign aide responded to the Romney effort saying “that’s not our style,” adding “campaigns are a reflection of the candidate.”

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Talk about a venue change.

Fresh from giving an economic speech in the heart of the industrial Rust Belt, President Barack Obama headed to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village on Thursday to hold a big-dollar campaign fundraiser with rich donors at the home of “Sex and the City” actress Sarah Jessica Parker

During a speech at a community college in Cleveland, the president charged that Republican Mitt Romney, a multimillionaire private equity executive and former governor of Massachusetts, would hollow out the middle class.

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The evening fundraiser, co-hosted by Parker’s husband, actor Matthew Broderick, and Vogue magazine editor Anna Wintour, was decidedly not a showcase of all things middle class. Tickets cost $40,000 and 50 people were expected to attend.

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But there is one group of people Obama has to listen to: the people who give him large sums of money. He recently attended his 150th fundraiser. That’s more than the number attended by the last four presidents put together…

He’s also had plenty of chances to absorb the advice of the kind of rich liberals who like to give money to Democratic presidents. And the evidence that he has taken some of that advice is his initiatives on three controversial issues, each of which involves serious political risk…

The question is, is he listening to anyone else?

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At DreamWorks Studios, Steven Spielberg spent three hours explaining how to capture an audience’s attention and offered a number of ideas that will be rolled out before Election Day. An early example of Spielberg’s influence is RomneyEconomics.com, a website designed by the Obama team to tell the story — a horror story, by their reckoning — of Mitt Romney’s career at Bain Capital. Afterward, Spielberg insisted that Messina sit down with the DreamWorks marketing team. Hollywood movie studios are expert, as presidential campaigns also must be, at spending huge sums over a few weeks to reach and motivate millions of Americans.

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Prior to President Barack Obama’s marathon 54 minute speech in Ohio today, the Obama campaign sent our several statements promising the speech would be a major address framing the campaign going forward. Despite the hype, the speech was mainly a rehash of themes and ideas from the president’s recent stump speeches and his remarks were widely panned as overly long by the political press corps.

In the speech, President Obama outlined his view that this election is a choice between “two fundamentally different views of which direction America should take.” He characterized Mitt Romney’s vision as being the same as the “policies of the last decade,” specifically deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy while he described his own “vision for America” as boiling down to five things: “Education. Energy. Innovation. Infrastructure. And a tax code focused on American job creation and balanced deficit reduction.” President Obama also stressed that the economic crisis began during the Bush administration and that is “started growing again” after he took office and has since “continued to grow.”

All of these points have already been featured in the president’s other recent speeches. Between the pre-speech hype from the campaign, the lack of new material and the overall length of the speech reporters were clearly dissatisfied with end result.

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“Now you may have heard that President Obama is on the other side of the state and he’s going to be delivering a speech on the economy. He’s doing that because he has not delivered a recovery for the economy,” Romney said during a speech in Cincinnati. “But don’t forget, he’s been president for three and a half years. And talk is cheap. Action speaks very loud.”

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