Obamas get personal on the campaign trail

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

He talks about his single mother and the grandmother who helped raise him. He tells voters he misses his wife when they’re apart. She tells voters he’s still cute, even with gray hair.

President Barack Obama and the first lady are frequently sharing personal tidbits on the campaign trail, seeking to remind people of one big reason they voted for him in the first place — a lot of them like him personally — while countering Republican rival Mitt Romney’s assertions that the president is running on division and hate.

“Your president is the son of a single mother who struggled to put herself through school and pay the bills,” Mrs. Obama said Wednesday, taking the stage before her husband in Iowa. “He’s the grandson of a woman who woke up before dawn every day to catch a bus to her job at a bank.”

Not that it’s become simply a campaign of uplifting family stories.

With polls showing a close race less than three months before the election, Obama also has been pummeling Romney with negative television ads. He mocks Romney’s tax policies. And he declines to denounce an ad from an outside group supporting him that suggests Romney was at least partially responsible for a woman’s cancer death.

In response, Romney recently accused Obama of running a campaign based on “division and attack and hatred.” It was an attempt to both fire up the GOP base and undercut Obama in the fight for undecided voters who could determine the outcome in close states.

Polls show voters view Obama as more likable than Romney, potentially a big help to an incumbent saddled with a sluggish national economy and an 8.3 percent unemployment rate. So Romney is likely to keep trying to chip away at the president’s personal appeal. And the Obamas will encourage Americans to stay behind a president many of them still admire.