ALLENTOWN, Pa. — The first day of voting in the Republican presidential nominating contest is still seven months away, but Mitt Romney is trying to sound and act like the nominee.
On Thursday afternoon, as Air Force One touched down in Philadelphia to ferry President Obama to two fundraisers, Romney came to a shuttered steel plant about 70 miles north to assail the president’s stewardship of the nation’s distressed job market.
In 2009, Obama visited the Allentown Metal Works plant here, touting it as a symbol of the nation’s manufacturing might — an employer that would benefit from his $787 billion economic stimulus bill. But by this year, the plant had closed, laying off its workers and ending this city’s century of manufacturing history.
“Look around you: This is what he called the symbol of hope,” Romney said, staging a news conference in front of the factory’s locked fence. “There are weeds, boarded-up windows. . . . This was the spot he picked to symbolize the success of the stimulus. And my eyes tell me it ain’t working.”
The former Massachusetts governor repeatedly called Obama a “failure,” stressing his own 25-year background of working in the private sector and saying of the president: “He’s out of his depth when it comes to getting the economy going. It’s just not something that he understands.”
This is the latest turn in Romney’s strategy to concentrate his campaign on the economy and take his fight past his Republican rivals and directly to the president.
It’s also the clearest sign of the strong start Romney has had. Even though he remains a relatively weak front-runner, he largely has been able to dictate the terms of the race, with his challengers unable or unwilling to throw him off his relentless economic messaging.
Romney has ignored the few shots his rivals have fired at him over his health-care overhaul in Massachusetts and his evolving position on abortion rights. Although Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.) appears to be surging and has drawn some of the biggest and most enthusiastic crowds of the season during her announcement tour this week, Romney leads most polls nationally and in the early voting states.
Romney, who held two fundraisers in Philadelphia on Thursday, is widely expected to trounce his opponents when they post quarterly fundraising reports in early July, with his advisers estimating that the campaign will have raised less than $20 million.
Romney sought to compare that not with his GOP counterparts but with Obama, who he estimated would raise $1 billion during the campaign. “We’re not gonna raise anywhere near that kind of money,” he told reporters.
Because of the strong name recognition he gained during his failed 2008 presidential bid, Romney has the luxury of skipping some of the retail politicking his competitors are doing in the early voting states.
“He’s credentialed, well-qualified on the economy. He should stick to that and do nothing else,” Republican strategist Ed Rogers, who has not backed a 2012 candidate, said in a recent interview. “He is the front-runner. He can afford to go slow. He doesn’t need to have a big bang at this stage, just keep building his organization and keep building his money base.”
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