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Trying to shift the presidential campaign narrative away from his personal finances and tenure at Bain Capital, Republican Mitt Romney will launch a fresh assault this week accusing President Obama of political cronyism at the expense of middle-class workers... Obama campaign officials see this as a weak line of attack, in part because, they said, Romney played favorites by steering tax breaks to some companies over others as governor of Massachusetts.

The Mitt Romney campaign released a new television ad Sunday using the words of pundits and journalists to knock President Barack Obama for running negative ads. “[W]hen the president was elected, he talked about hope and change," CBS's Bob Schieffer says in the first clip. "Whatever happened to hope and change? Now it seems he’s just coming right out of the box with these old-fashioned, negative ads."

Citing a poll conducted by Global Strategy Group and Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group in the battleground states of Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida, Priorities USA claimed that more voters say Romney’s experience at Bain makes them less likely to vote for him, 37% to 27%. Claiming that its own anti-Bain ads are working, Priorities USA pointed out that in the 11 markets they’ve advertised in within those five states, Obama leads Romney by eight points (49% to 41%) compared with a three-point lead in those without the ads (46% to 43%).

Mitt Romney is continuing his air war on President Obama's campaign tactics with a new ad using the Democrat's own words against him. Instead of using Hillary Rodham Clinton's words against Obama in 2008 to underscore the point, the latest Romney ad deploys Obama's own words from his acceptance speech in Denver four years ago.

Mitt Romney's new TV ad says President Obama's attacks on his jobs record have been "misleading, unfair and untrue." The new ad once again uses Hillary Rodham Clinton to make the Romney campaign's point about Obama, showing an image of her from the 2008 Democratic primary saying "shame on you" to her then-rival for distorting her record.

...And that will all come on top of the barrage of negative ads from Republican groups. Despite the conventional wisdom that Obama would attack Romney to distract from the poor state of the economy, the Post finds that 100 percent of the ad spending from GOP-aligned groups Americans for Prosperity, the American Energy Alliance, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS have been negative. 58 percent of Romney’s spending has been on negative ads, compared to only 44 percent of Obama’s. If anyone can win this election on the strength of a barrage of misleading negative ads, it won’t be Obama, it will be his opponent.

Obama was described, and demeaned, as a “metrosexual black Abraham Lincoln.” Arizona Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee for whom Davis worked, was derided as “a crusty old politician who often seemed confused” and failed to exploit the target-rich opportunity presented by the venomous Wright.

A super PAC backing President Obama is out with a new TV ad today criticizing Mitt Romney for making money on business deals in which companies went bankrupt... "For every company he drove into the ground, Romney averaged a $92 million dollar profit," the narrator says. "Now he says his business experience would make him a good president? If Romney wins, the middle class loses."

While nationally the two rivals are locked in a dead heat, in 12 expected battleground states — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin — Obama leads by eight points in the survey.