STRATHAM, n.h. — Mitt Romney launched the next phase of his presidential campaign Friday, kicking off a six-state, small-town bus tour and telling middle-class Americans that President Barack Obama hasn’t given them “a fair shot.”
“If there has ever been a president who has failed to give the middle class of America a fair shot, it is Barack Obama,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee told hundreds of people outside a farmhouse plastered with his bus tour’s slogan, “Every Town Counts.”
The tour is Romney’s first traditional campaign swing aimed at undecided voters in battleground states. He hopes to win over people who voted four years ago for Obama’s promise of hope and change but who are now disappointed.
Still, Obama overshadowed the start of Romney’s bus tour as his administration announced it will stop deporting hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children.
Romney said the decision will make it harder to solve the country’s larger immigration problems. He did not say he would reverse the decision if elected.
In Friday’s remarks, Romney told supporters they don’t have to “settle for these years of disappointment and decline,” instead offering a nostalgic portrait of a promising small-town America that he pledged to revive.
The speech, delivered from the farm where he announced his presidential bid last year, was the official kick-off of the six-state bus trek aimed at swaying undecided voters living “off the beaten path.”
He will spend the next five days visiting what advisers described as towns Obama forgot — but in states he won in 2008. From New Hampshire, the tour goes to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan.
