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LIMA, Ohio—Barnstorming across Ohio on Friday,President Obama threw off the appeals to bipartisan harmony that had suffused his response to the East Coast storm two days earlier to mount a fiery attack on Mitt Romney’s attempt to discredit his bailout of Detroit.

The comforting commander in chief replaced by the political warrior, Mr. Obama hopscotched across this electoral battleground, accusing Mr. Romney at every stop of dishonesty for claiming that the president’s auto-industry bailout had resulted in jobs moving to China.

At issue is a Romney ad airing in Ohio that asserts that Chrysler, under new Italian owners, moved Jeep production to China after being bailed out by the Obama administration in 2009.

“That’s not true,” Mr. Obama said to a crowd of 2,800 in a cavernous barn in the town of Hilliard, as they chanted “liar” and “lying” about Mr. Romney. “Everybody knows it’s not true. The car companies themselves have told Governor Romney to knock it off.”



The commercial, Mr. Obama said, amounted to a cynical ploy to make up for the fact that Mr. Romney opposed the bailout and has struggled ever since with voters in Ohio, where one of every eight jobs is dependent on the auto industry.

“This isn’t a game: these are people’s jobs, these are people’s lives,” the president said. Claiming that the ad had unnerved some employees at the Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio, he said, “You don’t scare hard-working Americans just to scare up some votes.”

Mr. Obama’s harsh words, in a voice that grew raspier as the day went on, sounded like the stretch run of a marathon campaign, with the president pleading for every vote in a state where he is clinging to a narrow but steady lead in polls against Mr. Romney.

Mr. Romney is putting up a fierce challenge, kicking off a major rally in Ohio with his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, and an array of prominent Republican officials. The bitter confrontation between the candidates over the auto bailout illustrates the enormous stakes, and it has dominated headlines here and in Michigan.

The Romney campaign countered the president’s criticism by insisting that the ad was accurate.

“The facts are clear: despite his false and misleading attacks, President Obama took the auto companies into bankruptcy,” said a spokeswoman, Amanda Henneberg. “His mismanagement of the process has exposed taxpayers to a $25 billion loss.”

To try to offset rare public criticism from Chrysler and General Motors, the Romney campaign corralled an endorsement from a former president of Chrysler, Hal Sperlich, who said Mr. Romney would make the American auto industry more competitive.

But Mr. Obama seemed energized, fortified by a better than expected jobs report and his experience in the storm, when he won an endorsement from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and made a political bedfellow of the Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie.

“I’ve got a lot of fight left in me,” Mr. Obama said to 4,000 people in a high school gymnasium in Springfield, Ohio. He also went after Mr. Romney’s claims that he, not Mr. Obama, was a change agent.

“Governor Romney, he’s a very gifted salesman, so he’s been trying in this campaign as hard as he can to repackage these ideas that didn’t work, the very same policies that did not work, and he’s trying to pretend they’re change,” Mr. Obama said.

The show of harmony in New Jersey on Wednesday seemed a world away from the chilly Midwestern fairground in Hilliard. Even the minister offering the invocation jabbed Mr. Romney for his remarks about the 47 percent of Americans whom he claimed support Mr. Obama and rely on government handouts.

Warming up the crowd, former Gov.Ted Strickland of Ohio characterized a canned-goods drive that Mr. Romney held in Dayton for storm victims as little more than a cheap photo opportunity. And he described Ohio as “the firewall for President Obama” — a state he cannot afford to lose.

So much attention has been lavished on this state that it sometimes seems as if the candidates have been wooing Ohioans one at a time. Mr. Obama used his limousine, helicopter and a smaller version of Air Force One to reach Ohio’s nooks and crannies, traversing the flat landscape from Hilliard to Springfield and then north to Lima.

The Obama campaign has projected steadfast confidence that it will hold on to a victory in Ohio, citing public polls that show Mr. Obama ahead of Mr. Romney by a nearly two-to-one ratio among the 23 percent of registered voters who have already cast ballots.

Campaign aides also brushed aside Mr. Romney’s plan to campaign in Pennsylvania, saying it reflected the challenger’s weakness in Ohio. “It’s a desperate ploy, in the last throes of a campaign, to put another state in play,” said David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser.