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this manufacturing state, which suffered during the recession but has seen its unemployment rate fall from 7.7 percent in January to 7.2 percent in July.
• While Obama stayed in Washington on Monday, the president's team also reveled in the fact that he edged Romney in monthly fundraising -- $114 million vs. $111 million -- for the first time in three months, as well as in national opinion surveys that showed the Democrat's standing improving a bit after his national nominating convention in Charlotte, N.C., last week.
• In Ohio, Romney looked to take advantage of Obama's absence, blistering the president over deep defense cuts scheduled as part of a deficit-reduction proposal. Those possible cuts mean the city would lose its 179th Air National Guard unit, which would cost hundreds of jobs. That's on top of a GM plant that closed in nearby Ontario, Ohio, two years ago.
• "It will be bad for employment if it goes forward. It will also be bad for our national security," Romney said, promising to block such cuts as president.
• Here and elsewhere, Obama is working to spread a message of economic progress, despite a national unemployment rate stuck above 8 percent.
• In Toledo last week, the president argued that his decision to bail out the U.S. auto industry in neighboring Michigan has fueled a manufacturing turnaround in the region. GM recently announced a $200 million expansion of its Lordstown, Ohio, plant, where the company's best-selling Chevrolet Cruze is made.
• It's in this Midwest region where Obama reminds audiences that Romney wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in 2008 suggesting carmakers declare bankruptcy and restructure. Although that's what happened under the Obama's administration, the Romney piece's headline, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt," has been a bumper-sticker line for the Obama campaign.
• "Do the folks in Ohio really think that Gov. Romney, with his views on outsourcing, with his views on General Motors and Chrysler and beyond that, do they honestly believe that if he had been president the last four years that today that there would be today 115,000 auto jobs in Ohio?" Biden said last weekend in Zanesville, 55 miles east of Columbus.
• Countering, Romney tries to stoke doubt about the president's economic competence, and he criticizes Obama on energy, specifically the administration's regulations on coal mining and oil and gas drilling. Those issues resonate in southern Ohio.
• It is all part of a two-fold Ohio strategy by Romney: suppress Obama's edge in places like swing-voting northern and central Ohio while dispatching Ryan, from working-class Janesville, Wis., to widen the GOP ticket's edge in towns along the

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