* Election campaigns take backseat for at least another day
* Christie praises Obama leadership on storm
* Obama to visit New Jersey, Romney back on campaign trail
By Steve Holland
KETTERING, Ohio, Oct 30 (Reuters) – President Barack Obama
and Republican Mitt Romney briefly put aside their fierce battle
for the White House on Tuesday, avoiding politics to focus on
relief efforts after mammoth storm Sandy left millions of
Americans struggling to recover.
With a week left in a deadlocked race, Obama canceled
campaign trips planned for Tuesday and Wednesday to stay in
Washington and supervise storm recovery, while Romney held a
storm relief event in the swing state of Ohio but ducked most
political talk.
The campaign truce was likely to be short-lived.
Romney will hit the trail again for rallies in Florida on
Wednesday, and Romney’s running mate, U.S. Representative Paul
Ryan, and Vice President Joe Biden also added new campaign stops
as the race heads to a tense finish on Nov. 6.
Obama on Wednesday will visit New Jersey, which along with
New York City bore the brunt of the storm, although he was
expected to return to campaigning on Thursday for the final
sprint to Election Day.
Both candidates have been forced to walk a delicate line,
trying to avoid appearing insensitive or crassly political after
Sandy inflicted heavy property damage, killed at least 30 people
and left millions on the eastern seaboard without power.
Obama held a video conference at the White House on Tuesday
with top members of his emergency team and spoke to governors
and other officials in storm-damaged areas before visiting the
national headquarters of the American Red Cross, where he warned
that the risks were “not yet over.”
The president’s crisis leadership won an endorsement from a
surprising source: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a
Republican and prominent Romney backer who said Obama should get
credit for expediting federal aid to the state.
“Cooperation from the president has been outstanding,”
Christie told CBS “This Morning,” adding he had spoken to Obama
three times, including during a midnight call. “He deserves
great credit.”
In Ohio, Romney struck a politics-neutral tone before
helping load a rental truck with crates of water and canned
goods to be sent to a distribution center in New Jersey.
“We have heavy hearts this morning with all the suffering
going on in a major part of our country,” Romney told several
hundred people, many of whom came with grocery bags of canned
goods and other items that will be shipped to the East Coast.
But politics were not far from the surface at Romney’s
event. A campaign video on the former Massachusetts governor’s
biography and family life was played to the crowd.
ROMNEY IGNORES FEMA QUESTIONS
Romney ignored reporters’ questions about comments he made
during the Republican primary season in which he said he would
shift funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which
is heading relief operations, to the states.
Biden told reporters FEMA was doing “one hell of a job,” an
echo of the comments famously made by former President George W.
Bush during the government’s botched response to Hurricane
Katrina in 2005.
“The governors are all cooperating with one another. The
mayors are all cooperating. I have never in all my experience
seen as much cooperation and acknowledgement of that cooperation
from city, state and federal levels,” Biden said.
Millions were left without power as Sandy rolled through
election battlegrounds like North Carolina, Virginia and New
Hampshire. The storm’s effects were felt as far away as the
swing states of Ohio and Wisconsin.
National polls show Obama and Romney in a dead heat,
although Obama retains a slight advantage in the key swing
states that will determine who gathers the 270 electoral votes
needed to win.
Obama leads Romney by 47 percent to 46 percent, according to
a national Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll, but 53 percent of
all registered voters predicted Obama would win the election.
Most of the campaigns’ attention has been focused on eight
or nine states, but Romney and his allies have launched new
advertising in three others – Minnesota, Pennsylvania and
Michigan – in a bid to expand the playing field.
The Romney campaign said the move was a sign of momentum.
“If the other side was on the move, they would be expanding into
states that John McCain won in 2008; instead, they’re fighting
to maintain turf in traditionally Democratic states,” Romney
spokeswoman Andrea Saul said.
Not surprisingly, the Obama campaign took a different view,
calling the expansion into new states “a decision made out of
weakness, not strength.”
“There is no Romney momentum in the battleground states, and
the Romney campaign has found itself with a tremendously narrow
and improbable path to 270 electoral votes,” Obama campaign
manager Jim Messina said in a statement.
“Now, like Republicans did in 2008, they are throwing money
at states where they never built an organization and have been
losing for two years,” Messina said.
The Obama campaign responded with its own ads in the three
states, and dispatched former President Bill Clinton to
Minnesota. Clinton will also make appearances on Tuesday in the
swing state of Colorado.
Both campaigns continued pouring advertisements into the
presidential battlegrounds, and focused on voter turnout efforts
and getting supporters to the polls even in states hit hard by
the storm.
In Ohio, where one of every eight jobs is tied to the auto
industry, Obama got some support in an ongoing spat with the
Romney campaign about Romney’s claim that Chrysler planned to
move Jeep vehicle production out of the United States to China.
The chief executive of Chrysler, Sergio Marchionne, on
Tuesday refuted Romney’s statement, which has become a subject
of dueling television ads between the Romney and Obama campaigns
in Ohio.
Romney has tried to undercut Obama’s decision to give the
auto industry a federal bailout, a popular move in Ohio that has
helped fuel the president’s slight but steady advantage over
Romney in the Midwestern state.
“I feel obliged to unambiguously restate our position: Jeep
production will not be moved from the United States to China,”
he told employees by email.
