Barack Obama, 2012 Presidential Election | featured news

House Democrats raise money off a Romney supporter's comment that "lower income" people don't get the impact of President Obama's policies.

Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee easily outraised President Obama and the Democrats in June, pulling in $106.1 million, a substantial increase in Mr. Romney’s fund-raising pace and a sign of the growing competitiveness of the battle for campaign dollars against Mr. Obama, who raised $71 million during the same period.

President Barack Obama's campaign and top Democrats on Sunday called on Mitt Romney to release more personal tax records and raised questions about his offshore assets that the Republican challenger's campaign condemned as an "unseemly and disgusting" character assault.

The president can sink Romney by trumpeting the details of the ludicrous economic solutions he’s been backing. How Mitt would turn America into one big Pottersville... Romney is Bush on steroids. His tax plan is far more extreme. He wants to give millionaires an average—average!—tax cut of $250,000. The same plan would add $3 trillion to the deficit over a decade. Haven’t we tried this before, and didn’t it help lead—along with massive deregulation, which Romney also promises to pursue—to the biggest meltdown in 80 years?

If high unemployment "was a killer, he'd already be dead," said Republican pollster and consultant Mike McKenna. "The survey data tells you he's not dead." There's a problem with applying historical precedents and conventional wisdom to Obama. He sometimes defies them.

It sounds like President Obama and Mitt Romney are now competing to see who can be tougher on China. While Romney has vowed to brand China a currency manipulator on "day one" of his presidency, Obama this week played up a new complaint against China with the World Trade Organization during his tour of Ohio.

In a sense, what’s really interesting about the Romney and Obama plans is that they don’t conflict with one another. Obama has a set of ideas for boosting job creation now. Romney has a set of ideas for long-term economic growth. You could implement all of Obama’s 41 bullet points and all of Romney’s 59 bullet points simultaneously. There’s nothing about increasing infrastructure investment that keeps you from cutting corporate taxes, for instance.

"[B]usinesses have created 4.4 million new jobs over the past 28 months," the president said, "including 500,000 new manufacturing jobs. That’s a step in the right direction. That’s a step in the right direction. But we can’t be satisfied, because our goal was never to just keep on working to get back where we were back in 2007, and I want to get back to a time when middle-class families and those working to get to the middle class have some basic security. That’s our goal.”

An Ohio diner owner served breakfast to President Obama Friday morning — and then dropped dead hours later. Josephine “Ann” Harris, the owner of Ann’s Place in Akron, hugged Obama as her staff served the President a meal of eggs, bacon, grits and wheat toast just after 8 a.m. But soon after the President departed to continue on his campaign swing, the 70-year-old Harris complained of fatigue and a tingling feeling, according to the Akron Beacon Journal.

President Obama would like to carry North Carolina again, but he's having trouble with a couple of House Democrats in the Tar Heel State. U.S. Reps. Larry Kissell and Mike McIntyre -- both of whom represent rural districts with more Republican voters after redistricting -- have declined to endorse Obama for re-election.