Election 2012 - The guide to campaign news in the 2012 election.

This story has been updated.

They’ve been talking about each other for months. On Wednesday, President Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney spoke to each other for the first time since the general election campaign has begun in earnest.

File photo of President Barack Obama talking on the phone. (Pete Souza - THE WHITE HOUSE)

According to the White House, Obama called Romney just before noon to congratulate him on securing the Republican presidential nomination after he won the Texas GOP primary on Tuesday. Romney’s victory, coming after his leading challengers withdrew or suspended their campaigns over the past several weeks, gave him at least 88 more delegates, putting him over the 1,144 he needed to clinch the nomination.

“President Obama said that he looked forward to an important and healthy debate about America’s future, and wished Governor Romney and his family well throughout the upcoming campaign,” the White House said in a statement.

The call marked the first time the two men have spoken to each other since Obama was a U.S. senator more than three years ago, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said.

President Obama’s schedule for May 21: NATO summit and a visit to Joplin

By Natalie Jennings

President Obama will wrap up the NATO summit in Chicago on Monday, then head to Joplin, Mo. to speak at a high school commencement as the city prepares to mark the first anniversary of the deadly tornadoes that struck it in 2011.

View Photo Gallery: As world leaders gather in Chicago for the NATO meeting, the Occupy movement is taking advantage of the spotlight to showcase its message.

Mitt Romney has no public events scheduled.

Here’s your look at Obama’s schedule for May 21, from the White House Press office.

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Obama may clarify position on same-sex marriage in interview today

By Peter Wallsten

This story has been updated.

President Obama is likely to clarify his views on same-sex marriage Wednesday in an interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts. The interview is scheduled to be taped Wednesday afternoon, with the network planning to air portions of it later in the day.

View Photo Gallery: President Obama has come under pressure to take a stronger position on the issue of same-sex marriage in recent weeks. View our best photos from the campaign trail.

The president has been under intense pressure for his self-described “evolving” position on the issue since Sunday, when NBC aired an interview in which Vice President Biden said he was “absolutely comfortable” with gay marriage.

Biden’s comments put Obama on the spot, exposing the president’s position to ridicule among gay-rights activists who see it as a wink-and-nod stance to avoid alienating conservative swing voters as well as African-Americans and Latinos key to Obama’s reelection.

(Google+ Hangout with The Fix at 3 p.m. ET: The future of same-sex marriage.)

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Obama re-election campaign kickoff: A lot of excitement among supporters, and some nerves, too

By Amy Gardner

COLUMBUS — The Value City Arena on the campus of Ohio State University didn’t quite fill up for President Obama Saturday morning — and that wasn’t the only sign that 2012 will be different from the heady days of 2008.

Some of Obama’s supporters are nervous — really nervous, even physically anxious — at the prospect of him losing after a single term.

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Bin Laden anniversary: Biden called Obama’s approach ‘naive’ in 2007 during primary campaign

By Karen Tumulty

Proving that nothing is sacrosanct from partisan politics these days, the Obama and Romney campaigns are feuding over the first anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Specifically, President Obama’s team is raising doubts that the former Massachusetts governor would have acted to take out the al-Qaeda leader.

In this May 1, 2011 image released by the White House and digitally altered by the source to obscure the details of a document on the table, Vice President Biden,left, was among those watching an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House in Washington. (Pete Souza - AP)

In an e-mail to reporters, Priorities USA, the outside SuperPAC allied supporting the president, points to Romney’s criticism of a speech that then-candidate Obama made in August, 2007, in which he said: “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

At the time, Romney, who was running for the 2008 GOP nomination, said of Obama: “I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours... I don’t think those kinds of comments help in this effort to draw more friends to our effort.”

But Romney was not the only one arguing that the Illinois senator’s words were ill-chosen. One of his Democratic rivals--none other than the man Obama would ultimately choose as his running mate--called the statement “naive.”

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Obama to Romney: Release more tax returns

By Philip Rucker

President Obama and his top aides took aim at Mitt Romney Thursday night, calling on the likely Republican presidential nominee to release more of his tax returns and questioning whether he has used loopholes to avoid publicly disclosing more information about his personal wealth.

(DARREN HAUCK - REUTERS)

Seizing on a Washington Post report that Romney is using an exception in federal ethics laws to avoid disclosing the full extent of his investment holdings, Obama sent three tweets under his personal Twitter name attacking Romney. In his final tweet, the president wrote: “So what’s Romney hiding? Tweet @MittRomney to demand he release his tax returns. #WhatsRomneyHiding.”

Obama’s first tweet drew attention to The Post’s story: “The Washington Post reported today that Mitt Romney is using a loophole to avoid disclosing his financial records.”

In a statement, Messina accused Romney of having “put his personal financial assets in a black box and hid the key.” Messina called on Romney to release more than the two years of tax returns he released in February.

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Obama calls Sandra Fluke, Georgetown law student assailed by Rush Limbaugh

By Felicia Sonmez

Wading further into an escalating contraception battle that has put Republicans on the defensive, President Obama on Friday called Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University law student who this week was derided as a “slut” and a “prostitute” by conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh for her defense of rules mandating that employer-provided insurance plans cover the cost of birth control.

The call by Obama -- a rare one from the president to a private individual -- comes amid an intensifying political fight over religious-affiliated institutions and contraception, a battle in which Democrats accuse Republicans of waging a “war on women” and Republicans say that Obama is working to curtail “religious liberty.”

Obama frames issue as fight for women’s rights.

The president’s call is a signal that the White House, like Democrats more broadly, believes it has the upper hand on a hot-button issue that does not appear to be leaving the political spotlight anytime soon.