Obama, Romney race to finish line neck-and-neck

signs of exhaustion as they darted from swing state to swing state, trying to fire up enthusiasm among supporters and win over any last wavering voters before tommorrow’s election.
His voice husky from endless rallies, Obama flew to New Hampshire to reprise a late-night buddy act with Bill Clinton on Saturday, which saw the former president place his popular economic legacy on the younger man’s shoulders.
On a gruelling swing that will end in Wisconsin in the early hours of tomorrow, Obama also travelled to Florida, Colorado and Ohio yesterday.
Romney, clearly also feeling the pace of the frenzied endgame of a bitter White House race, was in Iowa, Ohio and Virginia.
The Republican nominee also made a run into Pennsylvania, long seen as a safe Obama state, but which Republicans think is now in play.
Obama seemed late Saturday to come to a wistful public realisation that after spending hundreds of millions of dollars, heading interminable rallies and travelling for months, his fate was no longer in his own hands.
“I’m just a prop of the campaign,” Obama told a crowd of 24 000 people on a chilly night in an outdoor concert venue in Bristow, Virginia.
“The power is not with us anymore, the planning, everything we do, it doesn’t matter.”
“It’s all up to you, it’s up to the volunteers       . . . you have got the power. That’s how democracy is supposed to be.”
Clinton told the crowd that Obama had done his best with “a bad hand” and deserved to be re-elected, as, in his folksy southern way, he went about dismantling Romney’s record and his ability to serve as president.
“I have given my voice in the service of my president,” a hoarse Clinton said on the latest of more than two dozen campaign events for Obama, before 24 000 people on a chill night in the battleground state of Virginia.
Clinton, a valuable character witness for Obama, will headline four rallies for Obama today in Pennsylvania, to counter Romney’s late push into the state.
Obama’s team says Romney’s raid is a sign of desperation and an acknowledgement that he can no longer put together the 270 electoral votes needed to win the election in the classic swing states.
They insist that they are in no danger of losing the state.
With two days to go in a race that has turned on Obama’s economic record and Romney’s past as a venture capitalist and the question of whether he is ready to lead, the candidates are closely matched.
They are effectively tied in national polls of the popular vote but Obama appears to be in a stronger position in the battleground states, and if the polls are accurate seems to be in position to win re-election.
In the latest show of good news for the president, he led Romney by five points in Iowa in a poll by the respected Des Moines Register newspaper, and also appears well placed in Nevada and Ohio — in the trio of “firewall” states that could hand him re-election. — AFP.