President Obama and Mitt Romney are painting contrasting pictures of the race. | AP Photos 1 week, 2 versions of reality

As if Hurricane Sandy weren’t doing enough to muddle the presidential race a week before the election, the two campaigns now seem to be embracing two sharply different versions of political reality.

The Mitt Romney narrative: The electoral map is expanding and we are on the march. Minnesota and Pennsylvania — blue states that neither campaign had been paying attention to — are tightening and if such patterns hold up, we could win a smashing victory with over 300 electoral votes.


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The Barack Obama side: There they go again. This is 2008 in replay mode, when John McCain had no path to 270 electoral votes and made a desperate gambit to try and put Pennsylvania in play. Romney needs to project Big Mo to paper over his struggles in the core battleground states. Nice head fake Mitt — but we don’t buy it.

Which side is blowing smoke? The truth of the matter rests, as it usually does, somewhere in the middle.

In the post-FEC limits era, when both candidates are free to raise and spend freely, money is not the object it has always been in campaigns. So with the dollars flowing in, Romney’s high command can take a look at single-digit deficits in states like Minnesota and Pennsylvania and lay down some cash on TV there, as they have in recent days. The best-case scenario is that you goose the polling a little more and, if the wind blows heavily in your direction during the campaign’s final days, you pull out a narrow win in one or both of these traditionally Democratic states. The worst-case scenario is that you’ve burned a few bucks you could afford to lose in a state you didn’t need and made Obama drop his own cash in service of creating the perception that Democrats are on the defensive.

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“It’s like buying a cheap lotto ticket with a little extra money,” explained longtime GOP strategist Mike Murphy. “Their day job is still, ‘How do we win Virginia and Ohio and get one more?’”

And the fact that Romney went up on Pennsylvania TV so triumphantly, issuing a press release entitled “Ever Expanding Map: PA,” suggests that his campaign wants the idea that they’re competing there broadcast as much as they actually want to compete there.

“It’d be one thing to take a quiet flyer,” said senior Obama adviser David Plouffe. “But they are playing it up, just like McCain in 2008.”

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Romney, Plouffe argued, is “talking about electoral paths that don’t exist.”

Rich Beeson, Romney’s political director, fired back that it’s not his campaign that’s playing electoral defense.

“If we were on the run in a way that they said we were, we’d be sitting in Indiana, Missouri or Arizona,” Beeson said, citing red-leaning states that have never really been in play this election.

Of Pennsylvania, Beeson explained: “This is the path to 300. McCain wasn’t trying to get to 300, he was trying to get to 270.”

The Obama camp is stretching the case to compare Romney’s move in Pennsylvania to McCain’s. Operating within the confines of the Federal Election Commission, the Arizona senator, badly lagging in the polls, had to cut his TV ads in competitive states like Colorado to be able to place a bigger buy in the Keystone State. Romney is doing no such thing.

Further, McCain actually showed up in Pennsylvania at the end of the campaign.

And that’s the real test of how serious Romney’s team is taking Pennsylvania and Minnesota — how they spend their human capital. Will they take their candidate off the Ohio-Virginia-Florida treadmill and drop him into Minnesota or Pennsylvania?

Asked if Romney was going to visit either, Beeson only offered up a “stay tuned.”

Such an eyebrow-raising move would either show real confidence that they have a shot in those states or completely vindicate the Obama campaign’s line that Romney is casting about for an alternative path to 270 electoral votes.

But until Romney touches down in Minneapolis or Philadelphia, it’s a neither-fish-nor-fowl scenario: He’s neither so assured about the core seven states that he’s willing to step away from them in the final week nor is he so downcast about the chief battlegrounds that he’d lurch for an alternative route to 270 by suddenly showing up on the Main Line.

And therefore, despite all the sound and fury, the race remains centered on the most hard-fought battlegrounds it has been for months.

As for Romney’s TV ads, there are two that his campaign didn’t tout to the press that say more about where his campaign hierarchy sees the most urgent needs of their campaign than the one they are running on Obama and coal in Pennsylvania. Romney is finally airing an ad on autos in Ohio, where he’s been pounded on the issue, and has also reprised his fact-checker-debunked attack on Obama over welfare in a separate spot airing in Ohio and other swing states. The campaign didn’t issue press releases about either one of these spots.

This is not to say that there’s not been real movement toward Romney in states like Minnesota that have seen little or no advertising.

Obama officials acknowledge as much. Not that they have to. They wouldn’t have deployed their top surrogate, Bill Clinton, to stops in Minneapolis and Duluth a week before the election if they didn’t need to shore up Minnesota. Nor would they be sending Vice President Joe Biden to Scranton, Pa., later in the week.

“We are doing the prudent thing,” said chief Obama strategist David Axelrod. “If they try to make a move on places, we’re just making sure we’re checkmating them. It’s an insurance policy.”

For the same financial reasons that Romney has the liberty to go up on TV in states beyond the core battlegrounds, Obama can afford to play aggressive defense in states that aren’t his primary focus.

That’s why he went up with a significant Minnesota buy when Romney made a minuscule purchase there, began airing ads in Pennsylvania once they got word that two Republican super PACs were going on TV there and, on Tuesday, confirmed that they’d begin combating Romney super PAC ads in Michigan with their own spots.

“They’ve got a pretty itchy trigger finger,” Beeson quipped.

Democrats subscribe to the better-safe-than-sorry school of thought, but the fact that Obama is airing ads in and, more tellingly, sending Clinton to Minnesota at this late date speaks to the president’s vulnerabilities in places where his campaign hasn’t spent millions defining Romney.

“It’s a function of not having run a campaign in those states,” said Axelrod of the lack of TV action in the Minnesotas and Pennsylvanias. “Romney’s highest exposure there has come in the last month.”

Of course, Chicago’s “insurance policy” is a euphemism for rearguard action in the minds of Republicans.

That the president is shoring up traditionally Democratic states that he easily carried four years ago underscores how much more difficult this campaign has been for him compared with 2008. He stretched the map so much four years ago and the economy has made him so much more vulnerable this time that he’s shoring up states that McCain abandoned in early October (Michigan) and never really competed in (Minnesota).

But given that they knew the economy alone would make this election harder than four years ago, why didn’t they move earlier to lock down these blue states?

The answer may be because they didn’t know if they’d have the cash to do so and still fully fund the core battlegrounds in the final push.

Now, money is no issue for either an Obama campaign seeing troubling polling data in heretofore safe states and can’t be too cautious enough or a Romney campaign that wants to project confidence and be prepared just in case the bottom really does fall out on the incumbent.

“This is what happens when you have a gun and too many bullets to shoot,” Murphy said.

And the shooting may not be done. A senior Romney official said they’re also eyeing New Mexico, a state Republicans had previously pulled staff from and in which neither campaign has aired ads.

“The Albuquerque [market] covers 86 percent of the state and the race is less than 5 percent there right now,” the official said.

David Chalian contributed to this report.