Labor Day puts jobs in spotlight for both campaigns
President Barack Obama greets the crowd during a grassroots campaign stop at Bayliss Park, August 13, 2012, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The shrinking American middle class thinks Congress and Obama are to blame for the decline in their quality of life.
The theme of the day is jobs, jobs, jobs as presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney hit the campaign trail this Labor Day.
The Romney campaign issued a statement marking Monday's holiday as "a chance to celebrate the strong American work ethic."
But he added: "For far too many Americans, today is another day of worrying when their next paycheck will come," reports AP.
Yesterday, Obama hit out at Romney's jobs plan from the Republican National Convention, calling it a "rerun agenda", reports Bloomberg News.
“What they offered over those three days was more often than not an agenda that was better suited for the last century,” Obama said at Living History Farms in Urbandale.
Monday, Obama is set to address a United Auto Workers Labor Day rally in Toledo, Ohio before moving on to survey the damage from Hurricane Isaac in New Orleans.
On the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC, Obama and campaign surrogates are hitting back at Romney's criticisms over the President's handling of jobs and the economy.
Romney will likely have more fuel for the fire on Friday when the August jobs report is released, one day after Obama officially accepts the nomination.
Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki told Politico that Obama will focus on explaining the difference between his plan and Romney’s.
“The president will head right back to the campaign trail after Charlotte to continue laying out for the American people the choice in this election and the difference between his vision for moving the country forward and the Romney-Ryan plan to take us backward,” she said.
Obama himself hit out against Romney's jobs plan at a crowed gathered Sunday at the University of Colorado-Boulder, reports Bloomberg News.
“They have tried to sell us this tired, trickle-down, you’re on your own, snake oil before,” Obama told the crowd of 13,000 people.
“Those ideas don’t work. They didn’t work then, they won’t work now. They did not create jobs. They did not cut the deficit,” he said.
Leading into Tuesday's start of the convention, Obama is zig zagging across battleground states he won in 2008 — Iowa, Colorado, Ohio and Virginia.
Bloomberg reports that it is going to be an upward battle for Obama as the unemployment rates in Iowa, Virginia and Colorado increased in July from the previous month.