Presidential campaign becoming all about who can win in Ohio

In Toledo last week, the president argued that his decision to bail out the U.S. auto industry in neighboring Michigan has fueled a manufacturing turnaround in the region. GM recently announced a $200 million expansion of its Lordstown, Ohio, plant, where the company's best-selling Chevrolet Cruze is made.

It's in this Midwest region where Obama reminds audiences that Romney wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece in 2008 suggesting carmakers declare bankruptcy and restructure. Although that's what happened under the Obama's administration, the Romney piece's headline, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt," has been a bumper-sticker line for the Obama campaign.

"Do the folks in Ohio really think that Gov. Romney, with his views on outsourcing, with his views on General Motors and Chrysler and beyond that, do they honestly believe that if he had been president the last four years that today that there would be today 115,000 auto jobs in Ohio?" Biden said last weekend in Zanesville, 55 miles east of Columbus.

Countering, Romney tries to stoke doubt about the president's economic competence, and he criticizes Obama on energy, specifically the administration's regulations on coal mining and oil and gas drilling. Those issues resonate in southern Ohio.

It is all part of a two-fold Ohio strategy by Romney: suppress Obama's edge in places like swing-voting northern and central Ohio while dispatching Ryan, from working-class Janesville, Wis., to widen the GOP ticket's edge in towns along the Ohio River.