As fatigue hits, Obama, Romney race to finish line
BRISTOW, Virginia, Nov 4, 2012 (AFP) - President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney will fight crushing fatigue on Sunday as they criss-cross America on the penultimate day of their tense and tight White House campaign.
Obama and Romney are both bearing the signs of exhaustion as they dart from swing state to swing state, trying to fire up enthusiasm among supporters and win over any last wavering voters before Tuesday's election.
His voice husky from endless rallies, Obama will fly to New Hampshire to reprise a late night buddy act with Bill Clinton on Saturday, which saw the ex-president place his popular economic legacy on the younger man's shoulders.
On a grueling swing that will end in Wisconsin in the early hours of Tuesday, election eve, Obama will also travel to Florida, Colorado and Ohio on Sunday.
Romney, clearly also feeling the pace of the frenzied endgame of a bitter White House race, will be in Iowa, Ohio and Virginia.
The Republican nominee will also make a run into Pennsylvania, long seen as a safe Obama state, but which Republicans think is now in play.
Obama seemed late Saturday to come to a wistful public realization that after spending hundreds of millions of dollars, heading in- terminable rallies and traveling for months, his fate was no longer in his own hands.
“I'm just a prop of the campaign,” Obama told a crowd of 24,000 people on a chilly night in an outdoor concert venue in Bristow, Virginia.
Clinton told the crowd that Obama had done his best with “a bad hand” and deserved to be re-elected, as, in his folksy southern way, he went about dismantling Mitt Romney's record and capacity to serve as president.
“I have given my voice in the service of my president,” a hoarse Clinton said, on the latest of more than two dozen campaign events for Obama, before 24,000 people on a chill night in the battleground state of Virginia.
Obama and Romney are both bearing the signs of exhaustion as they dart from swing state to swing state, trying to fire up enthusiasm among supporters and win over any last wavering voters