WOODBRIDGE: US President Barack Obama took a political sledgehammer to Republican foe Mitt Romney Friday, saying Americans rejected the "inside job" politics of a man who had written off half his nation.
With new polls cementing his front-runner status, Obama reprised unifying language from the famous 2004 speech with which he made his name, vowing to fight for students, single mothers and veterans no matter whom they voted for.
Obama's attack previewed how his campaign will exploit the tape secretly filmed at a fundraiser for rich donors at which Romney said 47 percent of Americans backed the president because they were victims and paid no taxes.
"I don't believe we can get very far with leaders who write off half the nation as a bunch of victims -- who think that they're not interested in taking responsibility for their own lives," Obama said.
"I don't see a lot of victims in this crowd today. I see hard-working Virginians," Obama told a crowd of 12,000 people in a minor league ball park, pitching for a state that he was the first Democrat in 40 years to win in 2008.
"I don't know how many people are going to vote for me this time around, but I'm telling the American people, I will be fighting for you no matter what," Obama said.
"I'm not fighting to create Democratic jobs or Republican jobs. I'm fighting to create American jobs.
"I'm not fighting to improve red-state schools or blue-state schools. I'm fighting to improve schools in the United States of America," he said in shades of 2004.
The president argued that the kind of people Romney had written off were hardworking single mothers, seniors, veterans, students and others, who were being helped by government grants, programs and benefits to a decent life.
Obama also hit back at Romney's claim that he had raised the "white flag of surrender" after he said Thursday that "you can't change Washington from the inside."
The president said it was obvious he was referring to building a popular movement to up pressure on politicians guilty of Washington gridlock, and openly mocked Romney, whom he will meet in three debates next month.
"For some reason, my opponent got really excited. He rewrote his speech real quick. He stood up at a rally, proudly declared, 'I'll get the job done from the inside,'" Obama said.
"What kind of inside job is he talking about? Is it the job of rubber-stamping the top-down, you're on your own agenda of this Republican Congress?
"Because if it is, we don't want it. If it's the job of letting oil companies rot our energy policy, we don't want it."
Romney's first chance to respond will come in a rally in Nevada later Friday.
Obama also noted in his speech that the last of the 33,000 surge troops he sent to Afghanistan have now left the country, and vowed to bring their comrades home by ending the Afghan war just like he ended America's war in Iraq.
Both campaigns also courted senior citizens who are an important voting block in battleground states like Florida and are prized by political strategists because they tend to follow through on voting intentions.
Obama addressed the convention of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) by satellite from Virginia, and laid into Romney again, saying programs like Medicare healthcare for seniors and Social Security retirement funds were not "a handout."
Romney's running mate Paul Ryan stopped at the convention, in New Orleans, in person, and told seniors that only Republicans respected them enough to level with them about budgetary threats to those beloved programs.
He accused Obama of harming Medicare with his "ObamaCare" healthcare reforms and said the president's government-centric approach would deprive seniors of the choice over their care that he and Romney were offering.
"You know President Obama's slogan, right? Forward. Forward into a future where seniors are denied the care they earned because a bureaucrat decided it wasn't worth the money," Ryan said.
Ryan, however, earned boos from seniors when he criticized "ObamaCare" and said the president would put future benefits for seniors at risk.
Democrats accuse Romney and Ryan of plotting to replace the state-financed Medicare system with a voucher program that would cost seniors thousands of dollars because it would not keep pace with healthcare costs.
There were new grumblings from Republicans on Friday after fresh polls in Colorado, Iowa and Wisconsin suggested Obama is now hitting the 50 percent mark, leaving Romney a stiff challenge in the final weeks before the November 6 election.
Romney needs to run the table in almost all contested states to reach the 270 electoral voters needed to make it into the White House.
Obama now also leads the RealClearPolitics average of national polls by 3.9 percent.
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