Barack Obama, 47% | featured news

The presidential campaigns and their allies began the week with aggressive attacks on the candidates’ records ahead of the first presidential debate on Wednesday. In an opinion article published Monday in The Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney accused President Obama of foreign policy failures, saying that the president had allowed the nation’s influence to atrophy by “stepping away” from American allies overseas.

After a secretly recorded videotape was released on Sept. 17 showing Mitt Romney making unflattering comments about the “47 percent” of Americans who he said had become dependent on government benefits, I suggested on Twitter that the political impact of the comments could easily be overstated.

New polling by Reuters/Ipsos indicates that during the past two weeks - since just after the Democratic National Convention - support for Romney among Americans age 60 and older has crumbled, from a 20-point lead over Democratic President Barack Obama to less than 4 points.

Fighting criticism of his controversial remarks on government dependency, Republican challenger Mitt Romney said Wednesday that he would better help poor and middle class Americans than President Barack Obama.

Romney campaign manager Matt Rhoades argues in a memo today that the differences between President Obama and his Republican opponent have become sharper. It makes no mention of Romney's comments from a fundraising event in May in which the GOP presidential nominee is heard talking about 47% of Americans being dependent on the government.

Will those paying no federal income tax "vote for the president no matter what"? Probably not. A lot don't vote, and of those who do, many vote Republican.

The good news for Mitt Romney: He remains within striking distance of President Obama. The bad news: His latest misstep could upend that.

That didn't take long. President Obama's re-election campaign has put out a video featuring voter criticism of Mitt Romney's closed door critique of Obama voters.

In a brief and hastily called news conference Monday just after 10 p.m., Mr. Romney acknowledged having made the blunt political and cultural assessment, saying it was “not elegantly stated,” but he stood by the substance of the remarks, insisting that he had made similar observations in public without generating controversy.

...He dismissed these Americans as freeloaders who pay no taxes, who don't assume responsibility for their lives, and who think government should take care of them.