The final weeks of a presidential race are supposed to give the candidates a chance to choose their biggest ideas and strongest pitches to win wavering voters and drive supporters to the polls. So how does Mitt Romney choose to address one of the biggest challenges facing the nation — its faltering education system?
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"We're going to finally fix our schools," he said on Wednesday in Reno. And that's all he said about his education policy. Not even a hint of how he proposes to do that, especially given his hope to make the Department of Education "a heck of a lot smaller." (He did give the usual verbal shove to teachers' unions for resisting charter schools, which have hardly proved to be a panacea.)
By contrast, President Obama talked about the subject in detail on his whirlwind tour of swing states this week. In Tampa, Richmond and Cleveland on Thursday, he said he wants to recruit 100,000 math and science teachers, train two million workers at community colleges in the skills needed for employment, and pressure colleges to restrain tuition growth. He made it clear that he will spend money on a national priority that Mr. Romney apparently feels can be left to the whims of individual states.
That's only one example of how the campaigns are approaching the finish line, but it illustrates the contrast in their conceptions of what voters want to hear.
Mr. Romney is providing nostrums instead of policies. "I'll balance the budget," he promised, though his plans to cut taxes and raise military spending would do the opposite. By comparison, Mr. Obama, though he waited too long to begin providing specifics on his second-term agenda, has decided to spend the last two weeks describing them. In his speeches and in a new publication, he is talking about using tax breaks to prod American manufacturing; spending money on repairs of roads, bridges and schools; investing more in renewable energy; and raising taxes on the rich to help pay for all of this. In an interview with The Des Moines Register, he said (after agreeing to go on the record) that he intends to renegotiate the sequester and focus on immigration reform if re-elected.
Mr. Romney, who has moved up in the national polls, has apparently decided to play it safe in the final stretch, as wary of explaining how his tax or jobs plans would actually work as he has been through the campaign. The latest swing-state poll numbers suggest that he will have to do better. In the crucial state of Ohio, Mr. Romney hasn't been ahead in any poll for the last two weeks, and on Wednesday, a Time magazine poll showed Mr. Obama ahead there by five points.
For Mr. Romney, Mr. Obama's decision to bail out the auto industry and his own rejection of it is proving to be an Electoral College challenge. Several states are also feeling the benefits of an improved economy. Obama campaign officials say that to win, Mr. Romney would have to pick off voters already committed to the president in states where Mr. Romney has never been ahead. "We think we maintain a lot more plausible pathways to 270 than Governor Romney, who we think has to essentially pull an inside straight," said David Plouffe, the president's chief strategist.
Those pathways exist because millions of voters still harbor doubts about Mitt Romney. He has apparently decided that in the final days of the campaign, he will do little to dispel them.
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