Asked by a reporter if he would watch his rival’s speech, Romney replied “Uh, don’t plan on it.”
Hours before the president took the stage, he got a timely boost with news that Wall Street stocks hit their highest levels
since 2007 amid a flurry of revived hopes for jobs growth and moves in Europe to quell the continent’s financial crisis.
Obama is under pressure to lay out specifics of what he would hope to do in a second term, and to go into more detail than the largely aspirational vision he has so far framed.
In the excerpts, the Obama campaign said the president would call for the creation of a million new manufacturing jobs by the end of 2016 and a cut in net oil imports by a half by 2020 plus the creation of 600,000 new positions in the natural gas industry.
He pledged to work to halve the cost of college within a decade and repeated his pledge by more than $4 trillion during the same period.
Those policy highlights appeared to hint at a renewed push for some ideas already blocked by Republicans in Congress rather than a wholesale reorientation of Obama policy.
Democrats devoted a portion of Thursday’s program to lionizing Obama’s record on national security, an area in which polls show he is favoured over Romney.
Obama’s decision to order a special forces raid deep into Pakistan last year to kill Osama bin Laden will doubtless play a starring role, along with his honoured 2008 campaign vow to end the Iraq war.
In a strong audition for someone touted as a possible secretary of state should Obama win re-election, Senator John Kerry lampooned Romney as a blooper reel Republican too weak to be commander-in-chief, taking sweet revenge for his own sunken White House dreams.
“Ask Osama bin Laden if he’s better off than he was four years ago,” Kerry said as he rocked the Democratic National Convention, twisting a phrase used by Romney in an economic attack to laud Obama as a steely leader.
Vice President Joe Biden was to take up the traditional attack role of the number two on the ticket, mocking Romney as a weak leader who would ship jobs overseas, according to speech excerpts.
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