Presidential candidate Mitt Romney insisted on Monday he was headed for election day victory despite polls showing him the underdog, and he leveled new criticism at President Barack Obama's foreign policy as running mate Paul Ryan rolled out on a three-day bus tour across the Midwestern state seen as critical for the Republican ticket's White House hopes.
Romney is back on the stump pushing his economic message in the final six weeks to 6 November, on the back of last week's opprobrium for his comments disparaging "47 percent" of Americans as government-dependent freeloaders.
He also earned criticism for spending more time fundraising than on public campaign events.
But after trying to draw a line under his 47 percent comments, insisting he would be a president who worked for all Americans, Romney vowed to lay out a thorough ground assault, reassuring voters that he and Ryan were "very anxious to get out and speak with as many people as we can."
"We hit the road pretty darn hard," Romney told ABC News after an appearance in Colorado.
Romney and Ryan will both campaign in Ohio on Tuesday, the first time the pair have appeared together at an event since 1 September.
In another interview – part of a series of quick hits with US networks Monday – Romney went so far as to predict victory.
"I'm very pleased with the fact that we have a campaign that is taking our message to the people across America and look, we're going to win," he told NBC News. "There is no question in my mind. We're going to win."
Ohio and Florida are seen as the two monumental battlegrounds of 2012, and after a handful of events in the Sunshine State late last week, Romney complete the final two days of the tour through the former.
"This is ground zero," Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, acknowledging the importance of the Buckeye state, told a crowd of about 1,200 people in Lima as they awaited Ryan.
"This is our rendezvous with destiny."
Ohio is pretty much a must-win for Romney; no Republican has ever been elected president without winning the state, and Obama is currently ahead by about four percentage points here, according to a RealClearPolitics average of polls.
In Lima, Ryan bounded out on stage and quickly lashed Obama for what he said was four years of economic failure, citing 43 straight months of unemployment above eight percent.
The US economy is "barely limping along, and the president has no idea how to grow it," Ryan said.
"The contrast could not be clearer in this election," he added, as he laid out the case for Romney, a multimillionaire investor who he said has the business know-how and experience to turn around the flagging economy.
But it was clear from a participant at Ryan's event that conservatives want to see more toughness from their candidates as they go up against the incumbent machinery.
"We need backbone in the Republican Party," 61-year-old Ohioan Dan Hermiller told Ryan, in comments that elicited cheers from the crowd.
Afterward Hermiller told AFP that Republicans need to "stand their ground" in Washington "instead of decaying and falling backward to the Democrats" on issues like federal spending.
One could argue that Romney has sharpened his tone. He hit out at Obama's comments on CBS's Sunday news hour "60 Minutes," in which the president said the economy has seen "some success" in emerging from recession and creating jobs.
"This is a tough time for the country, and status quo is not going to cut it," Romney said.
He also accused Obama of downplaying deadly Middle East violence as "bumps in the road."
The White House branded such Republican attacks as "desperate and offensive," but Romney said the president's comments smacked of weak US leadership.
"When the president was speaking about bumps in the road he was talking about the developments in the Middle East and that includes an assassination," Romney told NBC, referring to the death of the US ambassador to Libya.
"It includes a Muslim brotherhood individual becoming president of Egypt, it includes Syria being in tumult, it includes Iran being on the cusp of having nuclear capability, it includes Pakistan being in commotion."
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