Four years after it catapulted Barack Obama to victory, ‘change’ once again became the buzzword in US politics, as the President and his challenger Mitt Romney both revisited the theme in their last appeals to undecided American voters.
Having returned to campaign fields after a brief break from the election theme, brought out by Hurricane Sandy, the two candidates set about on a packed schedule of rallies through a host of battleground states.
Interestingly, both of them tried to present themselves as the real harbinger of “change”, the much promising election slogan of 2008.
Ahead of the last weekend before the November 6 polls, Romney described himself as the candidate of “real change”, while Obama dismissed the claim, even finding it laughable.
“Candidate Obama promised change, but he couldn’t deliver it,” Romney said on a campaign trail in Wisconsin, before heading to Ohio.
To which Obama retorted in Ohio by saying: “We know what change looks like, and what the governor’s offering ain’t it”.
Adding to the last days of election rhetoric came a stronger-than-expected October jobs report which expectedly the Obama campaign touted as showing signs of recovery while the Romney group shrugged off as insufficient.
At three rallies in Ohio, one of the most crucial swing states, Obama briefly referred to the unemployment figures when he said “we learned companies hired more workers in October than at any time in the last eight months.”
“We have made real progress,” Obama said, adding that “we are here today because we know we’ve got more work to do.”
Obama plans a series of stops across Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado and Florida over the weekend, and in between he described Romney as a “salesman” who was trying to “repackage” failed ideas this elections.
Unimpressed by the jobs report, that showed that the US added 1,71,000 new jobs in October even though the unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 7.9 per cent, Romney said the the increase in the unemployment rate was “a sad reminder that the economy is at a virtual standstill.”