Kicking off his latest jobs tour at a high school in Texas, President Barack Obama told students that making quality education affordable and accessible was a key ingredient to jump-starting the U.S. economy.

Speaking at Manor New Technology High School in Austin to 400 students and teachers, Obama praised the school’s innovative education approaches, saying that both superior education and more policies to help the middle class were key to creating good jobs and attracting skilled workers.

“Thanks to the grit and determination of the American people, we’ve cleared away the rubble of the worst economic crisis in our lifetimes,” said Obama, “We’re poised for progress.”

To “reignite the true engine of middle-class growth,” the president said, the country has to become a magnet for good jobs, help people develop the education and skills for the jobs, and ensure workers can “achieve a decent living.”

With a veiled jab at inaction in Congress, Obama said where he could, he was “just going to go ahead and take actions on my own” and later today would be issuing executive orders “that I'm convinced will spur innovation and help businesses create more jobs.”

Those two executive orders, first laid out in the president’s State of the Union address, will focus on strengthening manufacturing and ensuring government data is available in machine-readable formats.

Obama praised Manor Tech for the way it is working to equip its students. The school, focused on preparing students for STEM careers in science and mathematics, selects students each year through a blind lottery, and has won plaudits for its academic success since its opening in 2007.

The president pointed out how students had been putting their knowledge to work, pointing out projects he saw on his tour of the school, including building musical instruments from mathematics equations and the use of robots and other technology.

Saul Loeb / AFP - Getty Images

President Barack Obama greets students after speaking on the economy and job creation after touring Manor New Technology High School in Manor, Texas, May 9, 2013.

And, according to the president, too much public speaking can never be a bad thing. “While most high school students in America give a handful of speeches by the time they graduate,” he noted, “a student at this school might give as many as 200.”

Obama joked, “That’s a lot of speeches. I can relate.”

But, the president pointed out, one reason the school has been a success is that it has been available to all students, regardless of their socioeconomic status.

 “The majority of students in Manor don’t come from wealth or privilege,” Obama said, noting the success the school had not only in keeping its students in school but helping them attend college.

“Folks around here are doing something right,” Obama added, “and I think the rest of the country can learn from what you’re doing -- because I’ve always believed that the best ideas usually don't start in Washington, they trickle up to Washington.  So I’ve come to listen and learn and highlight some of the good work that's being done.”

“There are too many kids in America who are not getting the same kinds of opportunity through no fault of their own,” said Obama. “We can do better than that. Every young person in America deserves a world class education. We’ve got an obligation to give it to them.”

“We’re not just a collection of individuals, we’re one American family,” said the president. “If we follow Manor's example, if we give every child the chance to climb new ladders of opportunity, if we equip every American with the skills and education they need to succeed in the jobs of the future, if we make sure that hard work pays off and responsibility's rewarded, if we fight to keep America a place where you can make it if you try, then you're not just going to be the ones that prosper, we'll all prosper, and together we'll write the next chapter in America's great history.”

This story was originally published on Thu May 9, 2013 5:37 PM EDT

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a pivotal member of a bipartisan group of senators trying to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, said on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday that the key to a bipartisan “grand bargain” on entitlement reform and tax reform “is can we solve immigration?”

If Democrats and Republicans can come up with a bill to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, the South Carolina Republican said, it would open the way to a deal on entitlements and taxes.

Related: Graham warns of North Korean regime overplaying its hand

A member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham has been collaborating with three other Republican senators, Marco Rubio of Florida and Jeff Flake and John McCain of Arizona, along with four Democratic senators, to try to design an immigration bill. This group is known as the Gang of Eight.

“We’re hoping to get this thing done in the next couple of weeks,” the South Carolina Republican told NBC’s David Gregory.

The leading Democratic member of the Gang of Eight, Sen. Charles Schumer of New York said Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation that “So far we're on track. All of us have said there will be no agreement until the eight of us agree to a big, specific bill but hopefully we can get that done by the end of the week.”

The major impediment to reaching a final immigration accord is now the design of a guest worker program, Graham said on Meet the Press. If Republican negotiators are willing to allow a path to citizenship for those foreigners now illegally living in the United States, Graham said, “then the Democratic Party has to give us a guest worker program to help our economy. That’s what we’re arguing over.”

In a message to fellow Republicans, Graham said “the politics of self-deportation are behind us,” – a reference to an idea floated during the 2012 presidential campaign by GOP candidate Mitt Romney. Graham implied that the millions of non-citizens who are illegal living in the United States won’t leave voluntarily and he added that the concept of “self-deportation” was both “impractical” and “offensive.”

Graham said “nuggets” in proposals already leaked from President Barack Obama’s budget plan for the new fiscal year are “somewhat encouraging” and could lead to a deal with Republicans on entitlements and taxes. Obama is “showing some signs of leadership that has been lacking,” he said.

According to Obama administration officials, the president on Wednesday in his Fiscal Year 2014 budget blueprint will propose some changes in entitlement programs – such as a new formula for Social Security, which would effectively reduce retirement benefits, and raising the premiums that upper-income Medicare beneficiaries would need to pay for coverage.

“We’re beginning to set the stage for the grand bargain,” said Graham.

But he mentioned one idea that Obama has not proposed – raising the eligibility age for Medicare benefits from the current age of 65. Graham called for a change to “harmonize the retirement age of Medicare with Social Security.” For middle-aged and younger workers, the eligibility age for full Social Security retirement benefits is 67. For Medicare benefits, the eligibility age is now 65.

On immigration, Graham faces increasingly vocal opposition from some of his fellow Republicans in the Senate.

Related: LGBT activists jump into immigration fray, seeking same-sex partner protections, rights

On Friday, four Republican members of the Judiciary Committee, led by ranking member Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, sent a letter to Graham and the other Gang of Eight Republicans saying, “your group has secretly met for months and not consulted with members of the Committee about major changes to our nation’s immigration laws. The time for transparency has come.”

Grassley and his GOP colleagues complained about   the “rushed timetable” which they say Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D- Vt., has set for committee approval of the immigration overhaul, moving directly to committee drafting of a bill, with no additional committee hearings.

“We believe it is time for you to discuss the status of your negotiations, disclose what concessions have been made, and provide details to members of the Judiciary Committee as well as the entire Republican Caucus,” the Grassley group said in its letter to Graham and other GOP Gang of Eight members.

Veteran budget experts said Tuesday that it may require a U.S. sovereign debt crisis to finally force President Barack Obama -- or some future president -- and Congress to agree on truly fundamental changes in fiscal policy.

Last week’s overwhelming bipartisan agreement between Obama and Congress enacted modest income tax increases for most workers (an average tax hike of about $364 in 2013, according to the Tax Policy Center), a return to the full 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax, and a two-month postponement of the “sequester,” the mandatory spending cuts required by the Budget Control Act. The deal made no changes in long-term spending or in the design of the entitlement programs such as Medicare.

Back in 2011, Obama signed the BCA into law in return for Congress agreeing to a higher federal borrowing limit. The law’s automatic spending cuts were designed to be the ultimate “action-forcing event” that would nudge Obama and Congress into clinching a historic bargain: entitlement reform and spending curbs combined with tax increases.

But three former Congressional Budget Office directors who assembled at a panel discussion Tuesday at the Urban Institute agreed that Congress’s attempt to design an action-forcing mechanism had failed. “I’m really at a loss for what kind of thing might cause the Congress to act in a sensible way,” said former CBO director Rudolph Penner. “We’ve reduced the credibility of something like a sequester. It’s just hard to come up with artificial crises of that sort.”

The BCA itself was supposed to be the action-forcing device – and it resulted only in postponing significant deficit reduction, not forcing it. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the deal Obama signed last week will increase spending and reduce tax revenues by nearly $4 trillion between now and 2022, compared to what would have happened if he and Congress had done nothing.

Another deadline – or another occasion for postponing action -- comes when the Treasury hits the government’s borrowing limit in late February or early March. Then at the end of March, an interim spending resolution expires. If Congress takes no action before that happens, parts of the government may shut down and federal employees could be furloughed for one day a month.

Penner said Tuesday that “those old warriors” – Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Republican Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell – might once again devise a stopgap, perhaps again postponing spending cuts and raising the borrowing limit.

Recommended: Biden says White House 'determined to take action' on gun reform

Penner said he saw no reason to change the forecast he has been making for a long time: “It’s going to take a sovereign debt crisis to get our leaders to act responsibly. If that does happen, I think groups like the AARP -- who have adamantly opposed even the tiniest of reforms of entitlement spending – will see that they have been very short-sighted. Their constituents will be hurt mightily” in a U.S. sovereign debt crisis by seeing their retirement savings evaporate amid a market crash.

A sovereign debt crisis would arrive if bond market investors concluded that the ratio of federal debt to U.S. national income was so high that it created doubts about full and timely repayment of money lent to the Treasury. Investors would force interest rates sharply higher to compensate for the perceived increase in risk.

Sovereign debt crises, or near-approaches to them, in Greece and other countries have resulted in dramatic cuts in government benefits without much advance warning, Penner said.  

He said he was puzzled that financial markets didn’t show a bigger reaction to the fiscal uncertainty in the run-up to last week’s accord, but he cautioned “markets tend to remain very, very calm as the budget situation deteriorates – until one day they don’t (remain calm). It’s not a gradual process…. These things are essentially impossible to predict, they can be set off by a bit of bad budget news on an otherwise slow news day.”

But former CBO acting director Donald Marron said his view was that “the hypothetical fiscal crisis for the United States is still many years in the future.”

Former CBO director Robert Reischauer warned that the Federal Reserve’s policy of keeping short term rates ultra-low “has eliminated one of the signals that the public and markets and (political) leaders look to in forcing action” on budgets. With such low interest rates, the federal government’s borrowing costs are not painful.

Related: Despite fiscal cliff setback, GOP remains dogged in resistance to Obama

The CBO reported Tuesday that there were signs of modest improvement in the budget picture in the short term: total tax receipts increased by 11 percent in the first quarter of fiscal year 2013 – and that came even before the tax increase that Obama signed into law last week. The 2013 fiscal year began on Oct. 1, 2012.

Spending was about the same in the first quarter of 2013 as it was during that period in 2012, when adjusted for shifts in the timing of certain payments due to weekends and holidays. Defense outlays were $9 billion (or 5 percent) less than in the same period last year.

But the bad news was that interest payments are already edging up, even without a sovereign debt crisis or a spike in interest rates.  The CBO said outlays for interest on the public debt were 7 percent greater than in the same period a year earlier, reflecting in part the growing debt held by the public.

For some Democrats, a lingering regret from last week’s deal is that Obama did not extract higher tax revenues; they worry that having agreed to income tax increases that largely fall on the top one percent of earners, the president won’t be able to persuade Congress to enact more tax increases this year or in 2014.

Larry Downing / Reuters

The Capitol Dome is seen on Capitol Hill, Nov. 9, 2012. To the left is the House of Representatives.

“The amount of revenue that was generated by the deal was far lower than the president and the Democrats had hoped for, and even lower than the amount the Republicans seemed willing at various times to put on the table,” noted Reischauer.

He added that last week’s deal will create the impression that higher income tax rates “are off the table in the future” – which he said was “very damaging” since higher federal revenues will be needed over the next few decades. He added that in order to provide the services and benefits Americans expect and to keep deficits and debt at sustainable levels, “we’re going to have to increase taxes on not (only) the (top) 1 percent, not the 2 percent, probably not the 20 percent, but the 30 or 40 percent of Americans. The sooner we face up to that, the sooner we can get on to other important issues that the government should be addressing.”

Noting that Obama had campaigned on sparing the middle class from having to pay any tax increases, Penner noted that that left the very high earners as the only source of more revenue. But, he said, “The arithmetic clearly shows that you can’t solve this long-run budget problem without the middle class making a contribution. The problem with rich people is that there just aren’t enough of them.”

Updated at 6:05 p.m. ET -- Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder called himself "one tough nerd" in his 2010 gubernatorial campaign, fashioning himself as a pragmatic problem-solver who wouldn't delve into the divisive partisanship that had come to define some of his fellow Republicans.

Related: Michigan House passes right-to-work legislation

But now that Snyder has signed historic legislation making Michigan the nation's 24th right-to-work state, detractors will likely lump the governor with those firebrand Republicans, a distinction that he had long sought to avoid.

“I didn’t do this to get into the politics of it,” Snyder said on MSNBC Tuesday afternoon of the fight. He said the issue reached a “critical mass” after organized labor unsuccessfully pushed a ballot initiative this November that would have established a right to collective bargaining in the Michigan constitution.

Snyder had previously said that pursuing this legislation was not on his agenda. But Republicans in the statehouse, whose majorities in the House and Senate will be narrower next year due to the 2012 elections, revived the long-dormant proposal with Snyder's eventual blessing.

"Once we had the support that we had, the next step was convincing the governor that this was a good thing," said state Republican Rep. Marty Knollenberg, a primary sponsor of the bill in the House. "It certainly started from the legislature, and then it was presented to the governor … I think he was sort of taking a wait-and-see attitude. It wasn’t on his priority list, as he indicated."

But Snyder did ultimately embrace the law, and signed it into law on Tuesday evening. Whether he would be able to preserve his reputation as a non-ideologue is an open question.

"I think he kind of decided he couldn’t string this out any longer. The idea that he had some sort of moment where he was converted in a blinding flash of light – I don’t think that’s the case," said Bill Ballenger, editor of the "Inside Michigan Politics" newsletter. "Here you’ve got Michigan looking, all of a sudden, far more extreme and aggressive that Scott Walker. Isn’t that ironic?"

Snyder enjoyed a 51 percent approval rating for Snyder in an early December EPIC-MRA poll; 48 percent of Michiganders said they had a negative impression of Snyder's performance as governor. The same poll found that Snyder had an edge over a generic Democratic challenger in 2014.

Recommended: Boehner demands Obama 'get serious' and offer new plan

But the state was much more divided on the question of whether the legislature should pursue right-to-work laws. While the EPIC-MRA poll found that Michiganders were generally supportive of the concept of those laws, they were evenly divided – 47 percent in favor, 46 percent against – on the question of whether Michigan should adopt such a law.

Dale G. Young / AP

Governor Rick Snyder presents his views on Michigan's future energy plans and how they merge with environmental and resource management issues at MSU's WK Kellogg Biological Station, Wednesday, Nov. 28, 2012 near Hickory Corners, Mich.

Indeed, Snyder's decision to move forward with this proposal will inevitably invite parallels with GOP Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's work to push legislation that stripped public employees of their collective bargaining rights in early 2011. Like Michigan, Wisconsin is an industrial Midwestern state with a long tradition of unionism. And as with Wisconsin, Democrats and labor activists stormed the state capitol with unmet hopes of halting the changes to labor law.

“I think it’s important to make a distinction with Wisconsin and Ohio,” Snyder said on MSNBC. “That was about collective bargaining. That was about the relationship between employers and unions. This has nothing to do with that. Right-to-work has to do with the relationship between unions and workers.”

The bigger distinction might be the extent to which Michigan's fight was relatively bloodless. The fight in Wisconsin dragged out for days as Democrats in the state Senate went into hiding in Illinois to try to prevent a vote. And labor fought for months to recall Walker, an election which the Wisconsin governor survived this past June.

The right-to-work law moved much more quickly through Michigan's state government, giving opponents of the law barely any time to stop the bill. Even President Barack Obama's criticism of the law during a stop Monday in Detroit did little to halt the legislation's progress.

That sort of criticism could threaten to erode the reputation Snyder had built for himself during two years in office. Snyder, a former CEO of Gateway Computers, emerged from relative obscurity in 2010 to beat two well-known Republican challengers, Rep. Pete Hoekstra and Attorney General Mike Cox, in the primary on the strengths of his plain-spoken, jobs-oriented message.

Snyder tried to burnish his bipartisan bona fides upon taking office by appointing former State House Speaker Andy Dillon, a Democrat who'd unsuccessfully sought his party's gubernatorial nomination in 2010, as his state treasurer. He had sought to build a new bridge between Detroit and Canada over the opposition of some Republicans, and resisted a GOP initiative to ban domestic partnership benefits for gay and lesbian couples before relenting.

Democrats and their allies in organized labor are sure now to redouble their efforts to beat Snyder in 2014, despite a relatively thin bench of challengers. More voters (40 percent) said they would be less likely to give Snyder a second term if he pursued right-to-work than those who said they would be more likely to re-elect the Republican. 

Michigan will become the nation’s 24th right-to-work state after Republicans in the state legislature approved historic changes to the state’s labor laws over the strenuous objections of Democrats and union members.

The state House, which is controlled by Republicans, voted to bar workplaces from making union membership a condition of employment. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, has said he would sign the law – a symbolically important strike at the organized labor movement in Michigan, a traditional union stronghold.

Paul Sancya / AP

Protesters gather for a rally at the State Capitol in Lansing, Mich., Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2012. The crowd is protesting right-to-work legislation passed last week. Michigan could become the 24th state with a right-to-work law next week.

The House voted 58-41, largely upon party lines, to approve a Senate version of the right-to-work law. The bill will head to Synder for signature.

Related: Michigan passes anti-union measure amid protests

As state lawmakers debated and voted upon the new law, thousands of union members rallied outside the state capitol in Lansing in an ultimately futile show of opposition to the proposal.

Michigan joins Ohio and Wisconsin – two other industrial Midwestern strongholds governed by Republicans in the statehouse – in advancing laws intended to weaken labor rights over the past two years. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, R, led an effort in 2011 to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights, which prompted massive protests and a legislative standoff. It also prompted an effort to recall Walker, which the governor survived this past June. Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, led the effort to pass similar legislation in his state, though it was undone by a subsequent ballot initiative.

Republican lawmakers had sought to ward off a similar ballot initiative by attaching the bill to an appropriations measure, a procedural tactic making the right-to-work law ineligible from a direct challenge at the polls.

Recommended: Fiscal cliff deal likely to be a fragile one

But union members believe they might have a chance to put the right-to-work law before voters as soon as 2014, though the changes to the law would be allowed to take effect in the meanwhile. And opponents of the right-to-work law would have to also meet a higher-than-usual threshold of support to put the question on the ballot.

Democrats vocally criticized the law in the debate preceding the vote, one lawmaker, Douglass Geiss, said there would be “blood” as a result of the law. State Rep. Shanelle Jackson, D, said the law guaranteed Snyder’s defeat in 2014, when he would be up for re-election.

Tuesday’s action makes Michigan the 24th right-to-work state, but only the second state in the Industrial Midwest to pass such a law. Michigan follows Indiana, which passed its right-to-work law in early 2012. Most other right-to-work states are located in the South and Plains states. Proponents of the laws argue that right-to-work laws have allowed those states to attract new jobs and industries, while labor advocates argue that workers in those states are forced to accept lower wages than they might enjoy in states where union membership in workplaces is compulsory. 

MONTROSE, Colo. -- Just hours after the latest unemployment report was released Friday, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan attacked President Barack Obama for not living up to his promise of getting more Americans back to work.

Related: Jobs data unlikely to sway undecided voters

"We just got the latest jobs report that voters are going to see before heading to the polls on Election Day. And what we saw today is that the unemployment rate is higher than the day that President Obama came into office," Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, said. "We are 9 million jobs short than what he said he would accomplish. Look, in the president's campaign for another term, he has offered nothing different and if he is reelected, nothing different is exactly what we would get."

Recommended: Obama, Romney bring their closing arguments to the Midwest 

The U.S. economy added 171,000 jobs in October, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics Report, and the unemployment rate ticked up to 7.9 percent, still below the important psychological threshold of 8 percent.

In the shadows of the San Juan Mountains, Ryan told voters in the key battleground of Colorado to hold on for just another few days.

"Here’s what it comes down to: we can't afford to wait four more years for real change to get us on the right track. We only need to wait four more days. Four more days and we can do this. Four more days. Four more days and we can get this on the right track," he said at the Black Canyon Jet Center to a cheering crowd.

Recommended: Democrats face very steep climb to 25 House seats they need

The Friday morning rally marked Ryan’s 11th in the Centennial State where Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and Obama are in a dead heat to capture the state’s nine electoral votes. According to a CNN/ORC International poll released yesterday, Obama barely edges out Romney, 50 to 48 percent, among the state's likely voters. The two-point lead for Obama is within the polls margin of error.

Romney will hold two events in Colorado Saturday while Ryan returns on Sunday for an event in Castle Rock before Tuesday’s election.

Updated 2:35 p.m. ET -- Four days before voters head to the polls, President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney sought to bring their different economic visions into sharp relief before throngs of Midwestern voters who could decide the election.

Romney, who delivered on Friday what he said was the “closing argument” of his campaign, said the economy was hopelessly mired in stagnation under Obama, and promised to deliver “real change” if elected.

Jim Young / Reuters

Supporters of Mitt Romney gesture at a campaign rally in West Allis, Wis., Nov. 2, 2012.

Obama pointed to green shoots of economic recovery while barnstorming battleground Ohio, accusing his Republican opponent of deception on the question of change, as well as the 2009 auto industry rescue that could swing the outcome of the election.

Romney started the day with a speech in the battleground state of Wisconsin, assailing Obama for having failed at his promise to change Washington; Romney said his experience in the private sector and as governor of Massachusetts has shown he can boost the economy and bridge partisan divides that have grinded lawmaking in the nation’s capital to a virtual halt.

“The question of this election comes down to this: do you want more of the same or do you want real change?” Romney asked. “President Obama promised change, but he could not deliver it. I promise change, and I have a record of achieving it.”

A robust campaign schedule for Obama and Romney, along with their running mates, brought the campaign back to its central issue -- jobs and the economy -- just as a key monthly employment report showed that the U.S. added more jobs than expected in October. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the economy added 171,000 jobs last month -- though the unemployment rate inched upward to 7.9 percent as the size of the American workforce grew.

Check out the NBC News' Election Briefing Book

“This morning we learned that companies hired more workers in October than at any time in the last eight months,” Obama said at a Friday rally in Ohio. “We've made real progress, but we are here today because we know we've got more work to do. As long as there's a single American who wants a job but can't find one ... our fight goes on.”

The stasis in campaigning that set in following the landfall of Hurricane Sandy earlier this week had all but faded Friday, as both campaigns resumed their full-throated critiques of one another.

Romney sought to wrest the mantle of “change” away from Obama, continuing on a theme he has stressed in recent weeks, and going so far as warning on Friday that if the U.S. doesn't change course, it could risk slipping back into recession.

Obama has long blamed Republican obstructionism and special interests for impeding his agenda, and thereby, the pace of economic recovery.

Romney, who made his first stop in Wisconsin since naming Paul Ryan, a congressman from the state, as his running mate, suggested his experience as governor of Massachusetts and a former private equity executive would help him succeed where Obama had failed.

Jobs data unlikely to sway undecided voters

"I have watched over these last few months as our campaign has gathered the strength of a movement," Romney said. "I will reach out to both sides of the aisle. I will bring people together, doing big things for the common good. I won’t just represent one party, I’ll represent one nation. I’ll try to show the best of America, at a time when only our best will do."

Romney traveled next to Ohio, where he would join Obama in courting the vote of the Buckeye State -- a pivotal Midwestern battleground where the outcome could determine the winner of the Electoral College.

There, the president upbraided Romney on the notion that the Republican nominee could deliver change, ridiculing the GOP nominee’s proposals as little more than warmed-over leftovers from the Bush administration.

“We know what the right choice is, but let's face it, Gov. Romney is a talented salesman,” he said, accusing his Republican opponent of repackaging tired GOP ideas. “We know what change looks like, and what the governor's offering ain't it.”

The Obama campaign has relied on Ohio to serve as a kind of “firewall” for the president, concentrating for months on building an advantage over Romney in hopes of impeding the GOP candidate’s path to 270 electoral votes. Obama has led Romney by a slim, but consistent, margin in most public polls, prompting the Republican ticket to ratchet up its attacks on the administration’s handling of the auto industry bailout.

Romney’s offensive includes a series of new ads taking aim at the president on the issue of the auto industry bailout, stoking (incorrect) fears that Jeep would move production and jobs from the U.S. to China.

First Thoughts: A status-quo election?

Those suggestions earned him a strong rebuke from both the president, as well as Vice President Biden, who campaigned in Wisconsin, a state that has reliably supported Democrats in recent presidential cycles.

"Everyone knows it’s not true. The car companies themselves have told Gov. Romney to knock it off," Obama said of the ads, accusing Romney of trying to scare the state’s autoworkers. "You don’t scare hardworking Americans just to scare up some votes. That’s not what being president is all about. That’s not leadership."

Biden, speaking in Beloit, went a step further: “In the last hours of this campaign, Romney and Ryan have become truly desperate. Romney will say anything to win.”

But Republicans returned to the issue of employment, arguing Friday that the employment situation had scarcely improved over the last four years, and hardly matched the White House’s projections upon selling its stimulus package in January of 2009. That, they said, justified Obama’s expulsion from office.

“In the president’s campaign for another term, he has offered nothing different and if he is re-elected, nothing different is exactly what we would get,” Ryan said at a rally in Colorado. “And we are not going to let him get away with that are we?”

BOCA RATON, FL. – The Sunshine State has earned a permanent prominence in America’s presidential elections and this year is no different. Both presidential candidates see their path to victory either enhanced or hindered by the outcome here. 

How important is Florida?  Listen to Vice President Joe Biden’s comments to Democratic campaign workers in Orlando on Saturday:  “If you guys produce, we win Florida.  We win Florida, this is all history man."

He added, “If you guys push Florida over, this thing becomes, uh, not close.”

Slideshow: Swing state voters sound off

Robert Wallis / Panos Pictures

In the key battleground state of Florida, divergent opinions separate voters with just over two weeks until the election.

Launch slideshow

A CNN poll released Friday showed a statistical tie in Florida, with Romney at 49 percent and Obama at 48 percent. Florida's dead heat between Romney and Obama reflects the state of the presidential race nationally: a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday finds that the two rivals each get 47 percent support among likely voters.

Times have changed. When Biden’s hero John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960, Florida had just 10 electoral votes, making it one of the less important states in winning the presidency.

But this year, Florida has nearly three times that number and the state has become indispensable to amassing the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House, making it a fitting setting for the final debate between President Barack Obama and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney Monday night in Boca Raton.

For Romney, the math is unmistakable. It is possible for him to amass the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency if he fails to carry Florida, but the he would have to sweep the rest of the battleground states or bring other states into his column that are currently holding steady for the president.

In contrast, Obama could win the presidency without Florida as long as he could hold on to Iowa, Wisconsin, Colorado, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire, all of which he won in 2004. That equation would hold true even if Obama were to lose Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina, as well as Florida.

Of course twelve years ago, Florida was the place where a mere 537 votes and a ruling by the United States Supreme Court decided the election for George W. Bush. The reason Florida keeps playing its recurring central role in presidential politics is that of the five states with the most electoral votes, it is now the only one that’s competitive in presidential elections.

In every presidential contest since 1980, there has been a strong correlation between each party’s share of the Florida vote and its national vote share. The only time since 1980 when Florida didn’t vote for the winner of the presidential election was in the tri-cornered 1992 race when George H.W. Bush narrowly won the state in his race against Bill Clinton, with third-party candidate Ross Perot getting 20 percent.

What’s often forgotten about Obama’s 2008 triumph is how close his margin of victory was in Florida.  Obama won Florida by fewer votes (236,450) than George W. Bush had won the state four years earlier (380,978).

In 2008, Obama won nine states that Bush had carried in 2004. Of the states that shifted from Bush to Obama, Obama’s winning percentage was the smallest in Indiana (49.9 percent), North Carolina (49.7 percent) and Florida (51 percent).

The task for Romney in the next 15 days becomes clear when you compare the Bush’s Florida victory in 2004 with Republican John McCain’s loss in the state in 2008.

One obvious place to start the comparison: As has often been noted, between 2004 and 2008, exit polls showed a massive shift in Latino voters in Florida from Bush to Obama. In 2004, Bush’s Democratic opponent, Sen. John Kerry won 44 percent of self-identified Latino voters in Florida, according to the exit poll interviews. Obama won 57 percent of Florida Latinos in 2008.

Another key part of the Florida electorate: Military and retired military voters in Duval County, the site of Naval Station Mayport and the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville.

In his 2004 victory, Bush’s biggest plurality in any Florida county was in Duval, which he won by more than 60,000 votes, with a total vote of more than 220,000.  Four years later McCain barely scraped by in Duval County, winning 9,600 fewer votes than Bush had four years earlier and carrying the county by fewer than 8,000 votes.

“Duval County is a conservative part of the state, with a large military and military retiree presence, which you would have thought that would have helped McCain, but also a very conservative and religious part of the state,” University of South Florida political scientist Susan MacManus said.

Yet Duval County also has a sizeable black population which the Obama campaign mobilized, increasing the Democratic turnout in the county by nearly 30 percent over 2004.

What happened in 2008 in Duval County and elsewhere in Florida “is that lot of conservative women were simply not engaged by McCain. That was one of the reasons that there was lack of enthusiasm for him; there weren’t a lot of campaign visits up there. McCain’s wife didn’t necessarily appeal to those women whereas Ann Romney, she draws crowds wherever she goes,” MacManus said.

On the other side of the state, Hillsborough County (Tampa and environs) proved to be a small-scale version of Florida as a whole when you compare the 2008 election with 2004.

Bush carried Hillsborough County in 2004 with 53 percent and the state with 52 percent of the vote. In 2008, Obama carried Hillsborough County with 53 percent and the state with 51 percent.

The pivotal role of Hillsborough County helps explain why the Republicans chose to have their national convention in Tampa. Underscoring again the importance of the county, Obama will travel to Tampa for a rally Thursday.

“The race and ethnic mix in Hillsborough County is very much a microcosm of Florida at large when you talk about the three groups of Hispanics, African-Americans and Anglos,” MacManus said. “And you’ve got a diverse age makeup in the county, more of an even split between younger, middle-aged, and older…. The age makeup is like Florida at large which is far less of a senior vote than a lot of people have been casting it as.”

She said three key geographies in Hillsborough County are used to do micro-targeting and turnout:

• Conservative rural areas that are largely agricultural, like Ruskin and Wimauma, centers for tomato growing, and Plant City, a strawberry-producing area.

• Suburban areas such New Tampa, home to many young professionals.

• The urban core in Tampa which is dominated by minority voters and is heavily Democratic.

“The big question mark in our state right now,” MacManus said, “is turnout among the groups that really launched Obama into the White House,” namely “younger voters, the most solidly Democratic voting group in Florida and the largest margin (for Obama) and also among Latinos. That’s what we're really watching here right now. And the suburban counties, with the glimmers of some recovery, whether they’re actually going to go back and be attracted to Obama, or still be concerned about the economy. I’m leaning toward the latter.”

In Florida’s economy, there are some signs of progress. The Commerce Department reported that in the second quarter of 2012, Florida personal income grew 1.2 percent, ranking Florida fifth among the states in growth. The state’s unemployment rate fell from 10.4 percent in September of 2011 to 8.7 percent in September of 2012.

But as of September, Florida ranked number one in foreclosures, a topic which Biden brought up Saturday at his stop in St. Augustine:  “On housing, no state has been devastated more by housing than this state,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to continue to push for people to be able to modify and refinance their mortgages.”

Of course Democratic passion for Obama was at its peak on Election Day 2008 and one saw evidence of that in the traditional Democratic bastions of south Florida:

• Miami-Dade County: In 2008, Obama won nearly half a million votes, a 22 increase in the Democratic vote compared to Kerry in 2004.

• Palm Beach County: Obama increased Democratic turnout by 10 percent compared to 2004

• Broward County (Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood): This was the county where Obama had his biggest plurality – more than 250,000 votes. He increased Democratic turnout by 8 percent compared to 2004.

On Election Night, if Obama under-performs in these Democratic bastions, or fails to win Hillsborough County, they would be bad omens for the president and his party.

NBC's Carrie Dann contributed reporting

One of the most heated exchanges in Tuesday night’s debate came when President Barack Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney clashed over oil and gas leases on federal land. 

The men interrupted each other over how many energy leases the Obama administration had issued, with the president saying oil companies “had leases on public lands that they weren't using. So what we said was, you can't just sit on this for 10, 20, 30 years… if you want to drill on public lands, you use it or you lose it… And so what we did was take away those leases, and we are now re-letting them so that we can actually make a profit.”

Yet that spark-generating skirmish was only one aspect of a deeper discord between the rival candidates on how America can develop more energy and what effect increased energy supplies will have.

The two candidates didn’t get around to grappling with difficult policy questions that have developed due to the increased production of oil and gas within the United States in the past four years:

• Should the new supplies of domestically produced oil and natural gas be used only in the United States, helping drive down domestic prices?
• Should U.S. natural gas producers be allowed to export more of the gas they’re producing, as they’ve petitioned the Obama administration to be allowed to do? (The administration is awaiting a macroeconomic study on liquefied natural gas exports which has been percolating inside the Energy Department.)
• Should the Environmental Protection Agency crack down on the technique known as “fracking,” which is used to produce natural gas, because it might jeopardize groundwater supplies?
• And, as journalist David Owen explains in his book The Conundrum, making vehicles more fuel efficient – which Obama took credit for in the debate -- in effect makes each mile driven cheaper. Will this tend to lead to Americans driving more miles? "The problem with efficiency gains is that we inevitably reinvest them in additional consumption," Owen writes.

The increased supply of natural gas and oil has fundamentally altered the energy picture in the United States – a fact Romney alluded to Tuesday night a few minutes after the men had their first energy clash: “By virtue of new technology (we can) actually get all the energy we need in North America without having to go to the Arabs or the Venezuelans or anyone else."

The Financial Times reported last week that for the first time in decades energy companies are poised to export substantial amounts of crude oil: at the port of Corpus Christi, Texas, crude is being loaded for shipment for the first time since the 1940s, the paper reported.

Related: Battery firm bankruptcy comes after bipartisan funding under both Bush and Obama

Going unmentioned in Tuesday’s debate was the failed 2010 cap and trade greenhouse gas emission bill, which was a centerpiece of Obama’s agenda in his first two years as president. That bill would have, at least in the short run, increased energy prices.

So – with the focus in Tuesday’s debate on lowering energy prices and not on reducing emissions – it might have been politically fortunate for Obama that the Senate didn’t pass the House-passed greenhouse gas bill in 2010.

Tuesday night’s energy clash began when a questioner in the audience told Obama that his energy secretary, Steven Chu, “has now been on record three times stating it's not policy of his department to help lower gas prices. Do you agree with Secretary Chu that this is not the job of the Energy Department?”

Obama didn’t give a direct answer, instead responding that “the most important thing we can do is to make sure we control our own energy.”

He claimed that “we” – and he didn’t specify whether by “we” he meant American energy companies or the federal government – “increased oil production to the highest levels in 16 years.”

He added that “natural gas production is the highest it's been in decades.” That’s true, in part to environmentally contentious “fracking” in Pennsylvania and other states.

According to an analysis by the Van Ness Feldman law firm, which specializes in energy regulatory law, Romney’s position is to ensure EPA regulations do not discourage “fracking,” while Obama administration policy has been to require all companies drilling for gas on public lands to disclose chemicals used during the fracking process.

As for lower gasoline prices, Obama contended that energy efficiency is “how we're going to reduce demand and that's what's going to keep gas prices lower.”

Obama also used the chance to mock Romney for saying that “when I took office, the price of gasoline was $1.80, $1.86. Why is that? Because the economy was on the verge of collapse, because we were about to go through the worst recession since the Great Depression, as a consequence of some of the same policies that Governor Romney's now promoting.”

But apart from the point-scoring and rebuttals, there’s a difference between the two men.

As energy consultant Geoffrey Styles has written, Romney’s energy plan “focuses mainly on oil, gas, coal and nuclear energy, which together meet 91 percent of current U.S. primary energy demand.” Obama’s rhetorical and thematic emphasis has consistently been on alternative-energy sources such as wind and solar, which still -- and for the near future -- will meet only a small fraction of U.S. energy demand. His endorsement Tuesday of “an all-of-the-above strategy… that's what we're going to do in the next four years” is not where he started out rhetorically in 2009.

Surprisingly, Romney passed up the chance to mention that battery manufacturer A123 Systems, which got nearly $250 million in grant money under Obama’s 2009 stimulus program, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Tuesday.

Obama also used the energy clash to score points against Romney for his apparent inconsistency on the question of coal, saying that “When you were governor of Massachusetts, you stood in front of a coal plant and pointed at it and said, this plant kills, and took great pride in shutting it down. And now suddenly you're a big champion of coal.”

Obama and his “opposition research” team were correct: as the Boston Herald reported in 2003, as governor Romney announced a crackdown on PG & E's Salem Harbor Station power plant.

"I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people," Romney said in a speech outside the plant. "And that plant - that plant kills people."

The mayor of Salem, Mass., said at the time that the electric utility threatened to close the plant – costing jobs and $6.5 million in property taxes - if Romney didn’t give the plant more time to meet new pollution rules.

"If the choice is between dirty power plants or protecting the health of the people of Massachusetts, there is no choice in my mind. I will always come down on the side of public health," Romney said at the time.

Battery manufacturer A123 Systems, which got nearly $250 million in grant money under President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus program, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Tuesday morning – just in time for Republican Mitt Romney to add the firm to his indictment of Obama’s green-energy program. In the first debate with Obama, Romney used the collapse of solar firm Solyndra to attack Obama’s energy agenda.

Herwig Prammer / Reuters

Energy Secretary Steven Chu

“A123’s bankruptcy is yet another failure for the President’s disastrous strategy of gambling away billions of taxpayer dollars on a strategy of government-led growth that simply does not work,” said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul on Tuesday.

But A123, based in Watertown, Mass., but with manufacturing plants in Michigan, got funding under the administrations of both Obama and President George W. Bush. The firm got a crucial influx of early money from the Bush administration in 2001 and 2003. In fact, the firm might not have been alive in 2009 to get its Obama stimulus funding if it hadn’t been for earlier subsidies under the Bush administration.

In a speech at a business conference on Sept. 4, 2008, then-Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman noted that in 2003 his department had made an award under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to A123 Systems for work on lithium-ion batteries.

“While this company now has major private investors, on many occasions the company's founders have described this SBIR grant as their first source of outside funding,” Bodman said. “And the results, now just five years later, are remarkable. This company now employs over 1,100 people who produce batteries with an unprecedented combination of power, safety and long life…”

He added, “I've had the pleasure of visiting A123 Systems, located right outside of Boston, and I can tell you firsthand that this company is doing terrific work.”

According to Jan. 21, 2010, testimony by current Energy Secretary Steven Chu before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, A123 Systems received SBIR grants in 2001 and 2003 totaling $850,000 to refine its lithium-ion battery technology.

Bush also laid the foundation for Obama administration subsidies to alternative-energy firms when he signed into law the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. (GOP vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan voted against the bill, partly due to an earmark in the measure that he said would benefit one forestry company.)

The 2007 law created, but did not fund, the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) program. In the summer of 2008 as the automobile industry was beginning to fall on hard times, Midwestern lawmakers proposed $3.75 billion to activate the ATVM and make loans to U.S. vehicle and battery firms.

When Obama became president, one of his highest priorities was to spur manufacturing of alternative-energy technologies and vehicles. The Energy Department used ATVM grants as a way to subsidize green-energy firms. On Aug. 5, 2009, Vice President Joe Biden announced $1.35 billion in DOE grants to spur advanced battery and electric vehicle manufacturing. A123 Systems got $249 million of that money.

“Terrific news," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. "A123 Systems is doing the kind of cutting-edge work we need to get our manufacturing industry back on track and create jobs here at home… These grants are a wise investment that will pay many dividends."

That summer of 2009 was a buoyant time for the firm, which launched its initial public offering in September, raising $390 million. “The IPO entered venture capital lore, a beacon for clean-tech entrepreneurs everywhere,” reported Climate Wire. The stock surged from its IPO price of $13.50 a share to more than $28 before 2009 ended.

The firm also got another Energy Department grant of $5 million to determine whether its batteries could store emergency power for the electric grid.

In January 2010, A123 was one of the firms benefiting from another stimulus cash influx – as the Labor Department announced the state of Michigan would get $5 million in grant money to train workers in green-energy skills.

In September 2010, Obama called Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to congratulate her and A123 Systems for opening the largest lithium-ion battery manufacturing plant in the United States in Livonia, Mich.

"It is incredibly exciting to see how far you guys have come,” Obama said, in remarks reported by the Detroit News. “This is about the birth of an entire new industry in America -- an industry that's going to be central to the next generation of cars.”

But there were skeptics.

By early 2011 one stock analyst, Theodore O’Neill, now at Litchfield Hills Research, told Climate Wire that A123 was heading for “a giant train wreck” in the next few years. He said the tiny numbers of U.S. battery-powered vehicles would not create enough demand for A123 to make a profit.

By this summer GOP lawmakers were raising the alarm about a Chinese firm taking majority ownership of A123 Systems. “We need to be sure that when the federal government invests close to a quarter of a billion dollars in grants to a company, that the technology developed as a result of this taxpayer support doesn’t end up in China,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

But that Chinese investment didn’t happen, and on Tuesday A123 filed for bankruptcy. A larger firm, Johnson Controls, will buy its factories in Michigan.

In an interview Tuesday, O’Neill said, “The Fisker Karma was the only car taking the A123 batteries. And I started calling around to dealers and as late as November of 2011 the dealers still didn’t have cars to sell. So you had A123 going ahead and building a 600,000-square-foot manufacturing facility for which there’s no end market. It’s not clear to me how much the Department of Energy is to blame for having A123 expand as rapidly as they did in advance of actual demand or whether it was all (A123’s chief executive) David Vieau” who erred in his forecast. “It’s probably a little bit of both,” he said.

Previewing Tuesday night’s debate between President Barack Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney, Democratic Mayor Kasim Reed of Atlanta said on NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday that Obama must “step up” in his confrontation with Romney.

In the first debate between the two candidates on Oct. 3 – widely viewed as a major victory for Romney – Reed said, “It took the stench of defeat to free Mitt Romney from the Far Right of the Republican Party; he got to move away because he was in such a desperate position that he got to say whatever he wanted to say.”

In their second meeting, Reed said, Obama must “stand up and every time sharply address him and not let him get away with” any evasions or any camouflaging of his positions.   

Another prominent Democrat, former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, said Romney is “a good pitchman, for sure. And that’s why in the second debate, I think it’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out because he can sell something; that’s sort of what he’s been doing. But the reality is: Who is this man and what’s really behind the facade?”

Granholm compared Romney to “a Trojan horse coming in to occupy the city of (Washington) D.C., but inside the Trojan horse are trickle-down generals and neo-cons, the same people who wrote the Bush plan.”

But Republican campaign strategist Alex Castellanos said, “Something big happened in that first debate that was beyond President Obama not showing up. And that was that President Obama hasn’t really been trying to get elected again, he’s been trying to stop Mitt Romney from getting elected.”

That strategy failed in the first debate, Castellanos argued, because Romney didn’t resemble the portrait of him that Obama and his campaign had been attempting to paint, but instead was “a reasonable, practical problem-solver.”

Castellanos contended that “Barack Obama now has no campaign for the future” and no argument for “why he’s indispensably needed. Now his campaign against Mitt Romney has cracked -- this is man with two empty holsters.”

 Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association said on Meet the Press that Romney’s upward movement in recent polling to either tie Obama in some battleground states, or even surpass him, reflected not merely Romney’s strong performance in the first debate but “a sharp contrast between the vision of Mitt Romney and the record of Barack Obama. It was the first time that 60 million Americans live got to see the two and another 60 million or so through social media got to see them.”

McDonnell said Romney’s momentum in recent polling “is a sustainable trend.”

But Granholm argued that Romney’s momentum will be slowed “not just by the president’s performance in the second debate, but by the economic numbers that are coming out that demonstrate that there has been clear progress. When we’ve got the lowest unemployment rate (at 7.8 percent last month) since the president took office and you’ve got a huge boost in consumer confidence,  the highest in five year, highest housing starts in five years, lowest foreclosure rate in five years, the number of jobs that have been created – I think that will seep in.”

McDonnell argued that the Obama campaign had been trying to divert voters’ attention from the still sluggish economy by pointing to secondary issues, such as Romney’s opposition to taxpayer funding for the Public Broadcasting System – epitomized by his comment in the first debate that, “I like PBS, I love Big Bird.... But I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for.”

McDonnell said, “The top issue facing the country isn’t Bain Capital, it isn’t Mitt Romney’s tax returns, it isn’t Big Bird – it’s how to do we get the greatest country on earth … out of debt and back to work.”  

As the presidential election reaches its apex in intensity, so have arguments from the right that polls and economic statistics -- the numbers used to explain the 2012 campaign -- are not to be trusted.

The theory that many polls are under-sampling Republicans (and thus overstating the support for Obama) has become widespread on the right, as many supporters of Mitt Romney asserted this week during rallies before the first presidential debate.

“I’d prefer him to be higher in the polls, but I think a lot of conservatives just aren’t being polled,” said Cathy Barnes, a Romney voter from southeast Denver who attended the Republican nominee’s rally last Monday near Aurora.

“I don’t believe what they polls are saying, they’ve clearly been Democratic-skewed,” said Daniel Zustek, a health care worker from Denver, at the same rally. “If you look at the numbers – such as Ohio -- they’ve lost a lot of Democratic voter registration in the city of Cleveland, which isn’t stuff that’s really examined when they’re running these polls.”

“Push comes to shove, I think he’s ahead. I don’t think the Democratic turnout will be as high as it was four years ago,” Zustek added of Romney’s chances.

Recommended: On day of data, Romney turns personal

“I think the media likes to slant what the Romneys do. Just because the media says something doesn’t make it fact,” said Rosabel Herrington of Romney’s disadvantage among women voters in most polls before a “Women for Mitt” event Tuesday in Littleton.

The argument is based largely on the notion that pollsters are using a turnout model that most closely resembles the 2008 election, when turnout was inordinately high and Democrats outpaced Republicans. Conservatives argue that these samples should more closely match the 2004 election (when Republican turnout was inordinately high), or, if nothing else, include more Republicans.

Bolstering that argument have been surveys issued by pollster Scott Rasmussen, which have typically shown a tighter matchup between Romney and Obama both nationally and in many swing states. (One reason for this is because the automated polls used by Rasmussen and other outfits -- which NBC News don't report on --  are barred by law from contacting voters whose sole phone line is cellular. These voters are typically understood to skew younger and toward minorities, and thus, more Democratic.)

Former Colorado Gov. Bill Owens (R) echoed this sentiment when firing up a crowd at a Romney rally Monday in Denver.

"As you know, this race is close, and it's going to get closer. Sunday's Rasmussen poll showed that 43 percent of voters say they are certain to vote for Mitt Romney, and 42 percent are certain to vote for President Obama," he said. "But as you know, the undecideds typically swing towards the challenger. And in Colorado, poll after poll has showed that our state is virtually tied."

Obama led Romney, 50 to 45 percent, in the most recent NBC News-Wall Street Journal-Marist poll of Colorado’s likely voters. And in the running tally of polls conducted by the website Real Clear Politics, which includes automated polls with varying party affiliations, Romney leads only in one: Rasmussen’s.

Recommended: Obama accuses Romney of shifting positions

And the Republican presidential nominee himself has invoked Rasmussen's polls to argue the race is much tighter than other polls had suggested.

"Actually the national polls, Rasmussen and Gallup have it a tied race," Romney told NBC's Ron Allen in an interview two weeks ago.

Since then, public opinion polls have shown the national tightening to a degree, and the impact of Romney's strong debate performance last Wednesday isn't fully reflected yet in polls.

The mounting criticism of polls mirrors what some Sen. John Kerry's supporters said about the Democrats' polling performance versus George W. Bush in 2004. But it also serves an unintended benefit for Romney in that Republicans might feel more engaged and active in backing the Republican ticket if they don't perceive it to be trailing Obama so badly.

A similar phenomenon emerged on Friday when conservatives expressed open skepticism of new monthly employment figures issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed that the economy added 114,000 new jobs in September, and that the unemployment rate had dropped from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent last month.

Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric (the former parent company of NBC News), set off a firestorm by insinuating that the administration manipulated the jobs numbers because they were so incredible.

“I have no evidence to prove that. I just raised the question,” Welch explained later in the day on MSNBC.

Welch also declined to retract his assertion: “I don’t want to take back one word in that tweet. … It just defies the imagination to have a surge larger than any other surge since 1983 a month before the election.”

Other political figures weighed in to support Welch’s assertion. Rush Limbaugh expressed skepticism toward the numbers on his show, and one member of Congress encouraged doubt of the official job statistics, too.

"I agree with former GE CEO Jack Welch, Chicago style politics is at work here. Somehow by manipulation of data we are all of a sudden below 8 percent unemployment, a month from the Presidential election," Florida Rep. Allen West (R) wrote on his Facebook page. "Trust the Obama administration? Sure, and the spontaneous reaction to a video caused the death of our Ambassador ... and pigs fly."

But that notion was startling to several other conservatives. Tony Fratto, a former spokesman in President George W. Bush's White House, called the allegation of labor data manipulation "dumb conspiracy theories" on his Twitter page.

And Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist who formerly served as director of the Congressional Budget Office, strongly disputed the idea that Obama would manipulate September's report.

"These numbers put together by the BLS or BEA, they're all done by career civil servants who are experts in the area with complete integrity," he said. "If someone tried to do that -- if I, during my time in the Bush administration, had gone to the BLS and said, 'Juice these numbers,' they would have called the Washington Post so fast. That's just not acceptable; it's not how the process works."

Besides, Holtz-Eakin argued, Republicans have plenty to criticize in this jobs report. He argued that the drop in the jobless rate could be an aberration based on an unusually high number of households to report employment in this month's survey.

"We still have a labor force participation rate that's down at 1981 levels, and we still have an unemployment rate that's not a cause for celebration either," he said.