Obama lampoons Republican convention

US President Barack Obama last night ampooned the Republican National Convention as better suited to an era of black-and-white television as he declared that Mitt Romney “did not offer a single new idea” to fix the economy.

“There was a lot of talk about hard truths and bold choices, but no one actually told you what they were,” Obama said, chuckling, as he set out on a three-day tour of battleground states in the run-up to his own convention. Later, he said, the Republican gathering was so rooted in the past, there should have been a rabbit-ears antenna on the convention hall.

Yet even the site of Obama’s convention, Charlotte, North Carolina, served as an unwelcome reminder to the Democrats of an economy so weak that it threatens his chances for re-election.

The president carried North Carolina in 2008, but the state’s unemployment rate is pegged at 9.6%, well higher than the nation’s 8.3% and tied with next-door South Carolina for fifth from the bottom.

Obama’s convention opens tomorrow at the Time Warner Cable arena with evening speeches by first lady Michelle Obama and San Antonio mayor Julian Castro, the keynote speaker.

The president will be nominated for a new term on Wednesday, when former president Bill Clinton also will speak.

Vice president Joe Biden delivers his own acceptance speech the same evening.

Obama’s prime-time acceptance speech, to be delivered at the outdoor Bank of America Stadium, caps the convention on Thursday night.

Aides predict a capacity crowd of nearly 74,000 will hear the speech at the site.

Democrats are taking their turn in the convention spotlight just days after the Republicans met in Tampa, Florida, to nominate former Massachusetts governor Romney for the White House and Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan to be his vice-president.

A parade of speakers in Tampa excoriated Obama’s handling of the economy, which is struggling in the weakest recession recovery of the post-Second World War era. The economy has been the top-rated issue in opinion polls all year, and the president is eager to turn the focus onto Romney on that subject.

Republicans “will take us backwards”, Obama said, to the age of “trickle-down, you’re on your own” economics that begin with tax cuts for the rich but tax increases for the middle class. The president made a brief detour to foreign policy in his speech.

“Governor Romney had nothing to say about Afghanistan this week or the plans for the 33,000 troops who will have come home from the war by the end of this month,” he said. The Republican challenger “said ending the war in Iraq was tragic. I said we’d end that war and we did,” Obama said. “I said we’d take out bin Laden and we did.”

His audience cheered the mention of the demise of the architect of the Sep 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, who was killed in his hideout in Pakistan by US Navy Seals last year.

Obama ordered the raid, and even Republicans credit him for the decision.

Romney told his own cheering crowd in Ohio he would cut the federal deficit and “get us on track for a balanced budget”.

However, Romney has yet to produce a budget for public inspection. Nor did he mention that, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, Ryan wrote a plan projecting the deficit would decline each year from 2013 through 2017 but then begin an inexorable rise again.

A modest bump in popularity for Romney from the Republican convention looks to be short-lived, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Obama regained a narrow lead on Saturday by 44% to 43% over his Republican challenger.