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KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — It was once President Barack Obama's "war of necessity." Now, it's America's forgotten war.

The Afghan conflict generates barely a whisper on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. It's not a hot topic at the office water cooler or in the halls of Congress — even though more than 80,000 American troops are still fighting here and dying at a rate of one a day.

Americans show more interest in the economy and taxes than the latest suicide bombings in a different, distant land. They're more tuned in to the political ad war playing out on television than the deadly fight still raging against the Taliban. Earlier this month, protesters at the Iowa State Fair chanted "Stop the war!" They were referring to one purportedly being waged against the middle class.

By the time voters go to the polls Nov. 6 to choose between Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, the war will be in its 12th year. For most Americans, that's long enough.

Public opinion remains largely negative toward the war, with 66 percent opposed to it and just 27 percent in favor in a May AP-GfK poll. More recently, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 60 percent of registered voters felt the U.S. should no longer be involved in Afghanistan. Just 31 percent said the U.S. is doing the right thing by fighting there now.

Not since the Korean War of the early 1950s — a much shorter but more intense fight — has an armed conflict involving America's sons and daughters captured so little public attention.

"We're bored with it," said Matthew Farwell, who served in the U.S. Army for five years including 16 months in eastern Afghanistan, where he sometimes received letters from grade school students addressed to the brave Marines in Iraq — the wrong war.

"We all laugh about how no one really cares," he said. "All the 'support the troops' stuff is bumper sticker deep."

Farwell, 29, who is now studying at the University of Virginia, said the war is rarely a topic of conversation on campus — and he isn't surprised that it's not discussed much on the campaign trail.

"No one understands how to extricate ourselves from the mess we have made there," he said. "So from a purely political point of view, I wouldn't be talking about it if I were Barack Obama or Mitt Romney either."

Ignoring the Afghan war, though, doesn't make it go away.

More than 1,950 Americans have died in Afghanistan and thousands more have been wounded since President George W. Bush launched attacks on Oct. 7, 2001 to rout al-Qaida after it used Afghanistan to train recruits and plot the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.

The war drags on even though al-Qaida has been largely driven out of Afghanistan and its charismatic leader Osama bin Laden is dead — slain in a U.S. raid on his Pakistani hideout last year.

Strangely, Afghanistan never seemed to grab the same degree of public and media attention as the war in Iraq, which Obama opposed as a "war of choice."

Unlike Iraq, victory in Afghanistan seemed to come quickly. Kabul fell within weeks of the U.S. invasion in October 2001. The hardline Taliban regime was toppled with few U.S. casualties.

But the Bush administration's shift toward war with Iraq left the Western powers without enough resources on the ground, so by 2006 the Taliban had regrouped into a serious military threat.

Candidate Obama promised to refocus America's resources on Afghanistan. But by the time President Obama sent 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan in December 2009, years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan had drained Western resources and sapped resolve to build a viable Afghan state.

And over time, his administration has grown weary of trying to tackle Afghanistan's seemingly intractable problems of poverty and corruption. The American people have grown weary too.

While most Americans are sympathetic to the plight of the Afghan people, they have become deeply skeptical of President Hamid Karzai's willingness to tackle corruption and political patronage and the coalition's chances of "budging a medieval society" into the modern world, says Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, a policy research organization in Washington.

"With millions of veterans home and talking with their families and friends ... some knowledge of just how hard this is has percolated down," said Marlowe, who has traveled to Afghanistan many times.

It has also been hard to show progress on the battlefield.

World War II had its Normandy, Vietnam its Tet Offensive and Iraq its Battle of Fallujah. Afghanistan is a grinding slough in villages and remote valleys where success if measured in increments.

The Afghan war transformed into a series of small, often vicious and intense fights scattered across a country almost as large as Texas.

In July, 40 U.S. service members died in Afghanistan in the deadliest month for American troops so far this year. At least 31 have been killed this month — seven when a helicopter crashed during a firefight with insurgents in what was one of the deadliest air disasters of the war. Ten others were gunned down in attacks from members of the Afghan security forces — either disgruntled turncoats or Taliban infiltrators.

Many argue that bin Laden's death justifies a quick U.S. exit from Afghanistan. Others say it's important to stay longer to shore up the Afghan security forces and help build the government so that it can stand on its own. An unstable Afghanistan could again offer sanctuary to militants like al-Qaida who want to harm American and its allies, they say.

"Those of us who have been at this for a long time continue to think that it's important, and that we have a chance now of a path forward with a long-term perspective that will produce the results," said James Cunningham, the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

The U.S.-led coalition's combat mission will wind down in the next few years, leading up to the end of 2014 when most international troops will have left or moved into support roles.

Military analysts say the U.S. envisions a post-2014 force of perhaps 20,000 to hunt terrorists, train the Afghan forces and keep an eye on neighboring Iran and other regional powerhouse nations.

Americans aren't likely to know the number until later this year. But will anyone other than families of service personnel take note?

"I have heard others say that the danger that their spouses or children are serving in is just simply not being cared about," said Fred Wellman, a 22-year Army veteran who did three tours in Iraq. "I think a lot of veterans feel it is just forgotten."

Political satirist Garry Trudeau captured the apathy about the war in a comic strip this year showing a U.S. servicewoman stationed in Afghanistan calling her brother back home.

After he complains that his children have the flu and how he's struggling to keep up with their hectic hockey schedule, he asks her where she's calling from. She tells him she's in Afghanistan.

"Oh, right, right ..." her brother replies. "Wait, we're still there?"

Associated Press Writers Kristin Hall in Nashville, Tennessee and Jennifer Agiesta in Washington contributed to this report.

WESTLAKE, Ohio (AP) — Paul Ryan says America isn't better off after nearly four years of President Barack Obama's leadership. And for a second straight day, the Republican vice presidential nominee linked the Democrat to former President Jimmy Carter.

Ryan campaigned in the Cleveland area Tuesday, the first day of the Democratic National Convention in North Carolina.

Ryan says Obama will say a lot of things when he speaks Thursday night in Charlotte, but that he won't be able to convince voters that they're better off now than they were four years ago. He says Obama's record is worse than Carter's when the Georgia Democrat was president.

The Wisconsin congressman also says Obama is more concerned about the next election than the next generation.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Democrats open their national convention Tuesday offering President Barack Obama as America's best chance to revive the ragged U.S. economy and asking voters to be patient with incomplete results so far. Michelle Obama, in her opening-night speech, aims to give people a very personal reminder of "the man that he was before he was president."

"The truth is that he has grown so much, but in terms of his core character and value, that has not been changed at all," Mrs. Obama said in interview airing on SiriusXM's "The Joe Madison Show."

The three-day convention has drawn thousands of delegates to a state Obama narrowly carried in 2008. And although Obama no longer is the fresh-faced newbie who leveraged a short Senate career into an audacious run for the nation's highest office, he still can excite partisans, and Democrats were counting on massive numbers to pack a stadium for his speech later in the week.

The Democrats dispatched U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, who hopes to unseat Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts, to make the case for Obama on morning talk shows, and she acknowledged that "it's tough out there" for many Americans. But she insisted that Obama offers the better vision going forward.

"Republicans are not helping us get back," she said.

Warren was up against GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin congressman, who held out the millions of people who are struggling to find work as an indictment of the president's first term.

"Four years into a presidency and it's incomplete?" he asked in a round of morning television interviews. "The president is asking people just to be patient with him?"

GOP nominee Mitt Romney's campaign reinforced that message with a new Web video answering Obama's statement that "there are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery." The new video showcases a series of ordinary people who've lost their jobs saying, "I'm an American, not a bump in the road."

Romney, his convention behind him, planned to spend the day in Vermont preparing for the fall debates with Obama.

If the economy is Obama's burden, he demonstrated the power of the presidency with a convention-eve visit to hurricane-stricken lands in Louisiana, offering aid and empathy. The president emphasized the government's determination to lend a strong helping hand. Romney, for his part, focused on neighbor helping neighbor in his visit days earlier, though both support a mix of emergency aid from the taxpayer and volunteerism in response to natural disasters.

On convention eve, Democrats released a party platform for ratification Tuesday that echoes Obama's call for higher taxes on the wealthy and reflects his shift on gay marriage by supporting it explicitly.

In a nod to dissenters on gay marriage, the platform expresses support for "the freedom of churches and religious entities to decide how to administer marriage as a religious sacrament without government interference."

As with the deeply conservative Republican platform, not all of which Romney endorses, nothing binds Obama to the specifics of the party's manifesto.

The president rallies in Virginia on Tuesday before joining the convention a day later.

Michelle Obama said she wants to use her opening speech to "remind people about the values that drive my husband to do what he has done and what he is going to do for the next four years. I am going to take folks back to the man he was before he was president."

San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro delivers the convention's keynote address Tuesday, a nod to the importance of Hispanic voters in the race.

"Under any score — immigration, education, health care — in any number of issues, he has been a very effective advocate for the Latino community," Castro said of Obama during an interview on CNN.

With flourishes but no suspense, Democrats will march through the roll call of states renominating Obama for president and Joe Biden for vice president on Wednesday.

That's also when the convention hears from Bill Clinton, whose 1990s presidency is being trumpeted by Democrats as the last great period of economic growth and balanced budgets — a further redemption of sorts, at least from his party, for a leader who survived impeachment over sexual scandal.

Obama's big acceptance speech is Thursday, and Democrats were closely monitoring the weather forecast. Officials had to decide by Tuesday whether to proceed with plans to hold the final night of the convention in an outdoor stadium or move it to a smaller indoor arena. Heavy evening rains doused Charlotte over the Labor Day weekend. Thursday's forecast calls for a chance of rain.

In a USA Today interview, Obama accused Republicans of building their campaign around a "fictional Barack Obama" by wholly misrepresenting his positions and words. He singled out Romney's claim, widely debunked, that the Obama administration stripped a work requirement out of federal welfare laws.

The Republican convention last week heard testimonials from a colleague of Romney at Bain Capital and from the founder of Staples, the office supply chain that grew from the private-equity firm's investments. Democrats, focused on enterprises that closed or moved overseas after Romney's firm got involved, are giving speaking time to workers from Bain-controlled companies who will tell the other side of the story.

Obama came out with a campaign commercial asserting that, under Romney, "a middle-class family will pay an average of up to $2,000 more a year in taxes, while at the same time giving multimillionaires like himself a $250,000 tax cut." Aides said it would be seen in Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia, the battleground states where the White House race is likely to be decided.

The president and aides have acknowledged for weeks that they and the groups supporting them are likely to be outspent by Romney, and recent figures say that has been the case in television advertising in the battleground states for much of the past two months.

Democrats chose North Carolina for their convention to demonstrate their determination to contest it in the fall campaign. Obama carried North Carolina by 14,000 votes in 2008, but faces a tough challenge this time given statewide unemployment of 9.6 percent, higher than the vexing national rate of 8.3 percent.

Woodward reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Ben Feller in LaPlace, La., Philip Elliott in Detroit, Kasie Hunt in Wolfeboro, N.H., and Michael Biesecker, Mitch Weiss and Beth Fouhy in North Carolina contributed to this report.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — President Barack Obama swept into his convention city Wednesday, eager to accept his party's nomination and make the case for re-election despite a sputtering economy. He hoped to claim a little luster from Bill Clinton's prime-time address to the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday.

In a last-minute shift, the president ditched plans to deliver his acceptance speech before a throng of 74,000 at an outdoor stadium on the convention's final night, citing iffy weather for Thursday. With a chance of thunderstorms on the horizon, Obama will accept his party's nomination indoors before about 15,000 people at the Time Warner Cable Arena.

Convention CEO Steve Kerrigan said the speech was moved "to ensure the safety and security of our delegates and convention guests." But GOP spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski cast it as Democrats downgrading the event "due to lack of enthusiasm."

"Problems filling the seats?" she asked in a statement.

Rep. Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican, dismissed the risks of speaking "during a light September rain" and speculated the decision "has to do more with attendance than participation."

Whatever the reason, the shift ensured there would be no repeat of the extraordinary scene from 2008, when Obama accepted the Democratic nomination in a packed-to-the-gills, 84,000-seat stadium in Denver, complete with ivory columns on the 50-yard line. Republicans mocked that as "The Temple of Obama."

The move also reduced the likelihood of anti-Obama hecklers, since most of those in the crowd will be official convention participants.

Obama planned a national conference call Thursday to those who won't get in to the smaller hall.

Clinton's convention speech Wednesday will be a high point in a checkered relationship between two men who sparred, sometimes sharply, in the 2008 primaries, when the ex-president was supporting wife Hillary's campaign for the nomination.

Democrats hope that as the last president to preside over sustained economic growth, Clinton can help propel this president to re-election in less rosy times. His wife — seen as a potential presidential candidate again for 2016 — will be worlds away from the debate, in distance and substance. Obama's secretary of state, she will be midway through an 11-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region and should be in East Timor by the time her husband speaks.

Obama's Republican rival, Mitt Romney, said flatly the president just wasn't up to the job.

"Anyone who wants him to try again will be making a big mistake," Romney said in an interview that aired on Fox News Channel. The GOP nominee, staying in Vermont, has been spending the Democratic convention week preparing for fall debates with Obama.

He framed the economic debate against Obama in an email to supporters, writing that "no president in modern history has ever asked to be re-elected with this many Americans out of work. Twenty-three million Americans are struggling for work, and more families wake up in poverty than ever before."

GOP running mate Paul Ryan, campaigning in Iowa, kept up his running criticism of the Democrats. He predicted Clinton and the Democrats would offer "a great rendition of how good things were in the 1990s. But we're not going to hear much about how things have been in the last four years."

Ryan cast the country's economic struggles in grim terms, noting the national debt reached $16 trillion on Tuesday. "That's a country in decline," he said.

To bolster Romney and Ryan, conservative groups announced nearly $13 million in new ad spending to counter Obama's convention.

American Crossroads planned to spend $6.6 million over the next 10 days on an ad that criticizes the economy under Obama's watch and Americans for Prosperity is spending another $6.2 million on ads criticizing the Democrats' health-care overhaul.

Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago mayor who served under both Clinton and Obama, made the rounds of morning talk shows Wednesday to trace a connection between the two presidents, speaking of "similar values, similar policies and similar objectives."

Clinton "can do nothing but help" Obama, Emanuel said, rejecting any notion that Clinton's ability to get things done and work with Republicans would somehow diminish perceptions of Obama.

But former Republican New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, writing in the New Hampshire Union Leader, said Clinton's speech "will serve to remind the world of a time when the leadership of the Democratic Party took fiscal responsibility seriously. It might even induce nostalgia for the days of balanced budgets and bipartisan accomplishments such as welfare reform."

The GOP released a new Web video showcasing the story of a man who lost his job and got back on his feet through the welfare-to-work requirements enacted under Clinton. Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus repeated the widely debunked claim that Obama was gutting the work requirements, "holding back the prosperity of so many who are scraping to get by."

Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, making the case for Obama's economic policies in an appearance on MSNBC, said the president has a strong argument to make that people are doing better, but she acknowledged that "Americans are sitting around the breakfast table trying to figure out to make ends meet, so we have work to do."

Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association, spoke at a breakfast with Iowa delegates and urged party activists to get fully behind Obama in the next two months.

"We have 60 days to turn to our neighbors, to find common ground, to appeal to their good intentions and to create a country of more by re-electing Barack Obama president of the United States," he said.

The Obama campaign insisted the decision to relocate his speech had nothing to do with worries about filling the stadium.

"Our concern was more about turning people away than about filling the stadium," Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters aboard Air Force One as Obama made his way to Charlotte.

Not only were there 65,000 people with tickets to Obama's speech, Psaki said, but another 19,000 were on a waiting list.

On the day after her big speech to the convention that sketched her husband in warm and personal terms, Michelle Obama told supporters at a luncheon promoting gay rights that it was time to get to work.

"We need you out there every single day between now and Nov. 6," she said. "You see my face? I'm serious? It's my serious first lady face. "My 'mom' face."

Woodward reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Jennifer Agiesta and Jack Gillum in Washington, Kasie Hunt in Vermont, Thomas Beaumont and Steve Peoples in Iowa, and Ben Feller, Ken Thomas, Matt Michaels and Jim Kuhnhenn in Charlotte contributed to this report.

ADEL, Iowa (AP) — Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan heaped praise on Bill Clinton Wednesday, holding him up as a model of reform and Barack Obama as his opposite just hours before the former president's speech to the Democratic National Convention.

Campaigning in Iowa, Ryan lauded Clinton administration action on welfare reform and spending reductions — areas where the GOP ticket has aimed some of its sharpest critiques of Obama, the incumbent Democrat.

Clinton, once an Obama critic, has become one of his biggest assets as the president scraps with GOP nominee Mitt Romney for re-election. Clinton, whose two terms ended on an economic high note, appears in a television ad where he likens Obama's agenda to his own.

Void of a single reference to Clinton-era scandals, Ryan's praise was a way to paint Obama as a failure on the GOP ticket's terms.

"Under President Clinton we got welfare reform," Ryan told an audience outside a small-town courthouse west of Des Moines. "President Obama is rolling back welfare reform. President Clinton worked with Republicans in Congress to have a budget agreement to cut spending. President Obama, a gusher of new spending."

Ryan, a House member from Wisconsin, also said a Clinton administration commission to study the future of Medicare inspired the GOP ticket's proposal to offer seniors a choice of traditional Medicare or a fixed government payment that could be used to buy private coverage.

"It's an idea that came out of the Clinton commission to save Medicare," Ryan said.

Ryan reminded the audience of supporters that the national debt surpassed $16 trillion this week on the first day of the Democratic convention in Charlotte, N.C.

"That's a country in decline," Ryan said.

Among Ryan's criticisms was an indirect reference to the GOP ticket's debunked claim that Obama has waived the work requirement on Clinton-era welfare reform.

Ryan also neglected to mention that the Clinton action he praised came after Democrats lost control of the House and Senate in 1994, having raised taxes in 1993 and tried unsuccessfully to enact a national health care program the following year.

The balanced budget agreement Clinton made with then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Georgia Republican, created the first new benefit program in years, a health insurance program for low-income children not eligible for Medicaid.

And Ryan made no mention of the scandals that marked the Clinton administration. Most notably the GOP-controlled House approved four articles of impeachment in 1998, though the Senate voted against removing Clinton from office.

Ryan was elected in 1998, but the impeachment votes took place before Ryan assumed his seat.

By treading lightly on the former president, Romney's team also is making a play for Clinton supporters who are disappointed by Obama.

Romney's campaign has stepped up its effort to appeal to working-class white voters in pivotal states such as Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Virginia.

White voters without college degrees preferred Clinton's wife, Hillary, over Obama in states such as Ohio during the 2008 Democratic presidential nominating campaign. They now prefer Romney over Obama by more than 20 percentage points, according to an Associated Press-GfK poll published last month.

Clinton's prime time speaking slot at the convention, like his central role in the Obama ad airing in key states, is seen as an effort to narrow Romney's advantage with these voters, who could tip the balance in a close election.

"Bill Clinton has very favorable approval numbers," said Katon Dawson, a national political consultant and former South Carolina Republican Party chairman. "He's a pretty tough adversary for us."

AP reporter David Espo contributed from Charlotte, N.C.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is reshaping his message from an all-economic pitch to an all-out challenge to what he argues is a failed status quo, taking a risk with barely 50 days to go in the campaign.

Former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie will have an elevated role in shaping the campaign message for the GOP nominee and will focus it more tightly on a broader change-versus-status-quo strategy.

"The timing is right at this moment to reinforce the specifics, more specifics about the Romney plan for a stronger middle class," Gillespie told reporters during a conference call Monday.

The point, Romney aides said, is that if voters find all aspects of the status quo, including economic and foreign policy, acceptable, they should vote to re-elect President Barack Obama. But if they are fed up with what Romney argues is failure across the board by Obama, they will turn to Romney.

With the campaign momentum currently on Obama's side, Romney sought Monday to explain to voters more clearly what he would do as president, as he looked to right his struggling campaign and ease worries in Republican circles about its state seven weeks before Election Day.

As the outward strategy changes, the Romney campaign also has launched a quiet outreach effort designed to stem dissention among the Washington Republicans who have been more and more vocal in their criticism of the nominee's campaign.

Key Romney aides have been tasked with leading the effort, which also includes discussions with Washington consultants tied to outside groups that have poured tens of millions of dollars into the presidential contest so far. Those groups, which are keenly aware of the perceived problems inside Romney's camp, are weighing how to balance limited resources between the presidential campaign and congressional races in the coming weeks.

Romney was using his own campaign dollars to launch new television ads highlighting his plans as he prepared to address a Hispanic business group in Los Angeles.

"My plan is to help the middle class," the Republican nominee says in a new TV ad in which he promises to cut the deficit, balance the budget, reduce spending and help small business. "We'll add 12 million new jobs in four years."

It was one of two new commercials he was launching in the most competitive states — the other assails Obama as bad for middle-class families — while also re-focusing his campaign appearances on his previously released five-point economic plan and starting a new effort to try to narrow Obama's advantage with Hispanic voters.

In addition, Romney was preparing to make a series of speeches aimed at offering voters a more concrete outline of his plans for the country and he's spending a significant amount of time preparing for next months' series of debates, mindful that the face-to-face meetings may be his last best hope of overtaking Obama.

The emphasis on Romney's plans for the future comes after a week in which Republican veterans of presidential campaigns publicly implored the GOP nominee to give voters a clearer sense of how he would govern, saying that simply castigating Obama wouldn't be enough to win. The new effort also follows a series of polls that show Obama with an edge nationally and in key states, and amid reports of infighting at Romney's Boston-based campaign.

With griping in GOP circles mounting, Romney and his advisers spent the weekend in Boston hashing out a plan to try to shift the dynamics of the race before the first debate on Oct. 3.

After a turbulent week that saw Romney stumbling to respond to an ongoing crisis in the Middle East, Romney chose to try to return to his comfort zone — the economy — and his argument that only he can solve stubbornly high unemployment given his decades of work in the private sector.

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, Romney's running mate, was to emphasize that pitch this week in appearances while also zeroing in on the debt and deficit.

Romney, for his part, was starting the week with a speech Monday to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles, as he looks to narrow Obama's advantage with these Democratic-leaning voters in key battleground states.

The campaign also was working to counter the notion of a campaign in disarray after a Sunday story on the Politico website detailed infighting among Romney's senior staffers. Campaign advisers worked to downplay those tensions and insisted the campaign is still on track.

"Obama's entire foreign policy is in flames. The economy is terrible. Let's get a little distance from the convention," top strategist Stuart Stevens wrote in an email Sunday morning, seeking to counter the notion of a campaign in a downward spiral.

It's been a tough few weeks for Romney.

Trouble began with Clint Eastwood's rambling conversation with a chair on the final night of the Republican convention, right before Romney's keynote address omitted the war in Afghanistan or a thanks to the troops serving there.

The intervening weeks have been scattered. Romney ducked battleground states as he hunkered down in Vermont for debate preparation, then spent days defending his decision to omit war from the speech. Polls showed the Democratic convention gave Obama a boost.

Then violence erupted in Egypt and Libya, prompting Romney to issue a statement criticizing the Obama administration before it was known that an American ambassador had died in Libya. Romney doubled down on his criticism in a news conference the next day.

That drew criticism from both Democrats and Republicans alike.

Romney's team sought last week to try to shift the tide by working harder and spending more on TV. The campaign released a flight of ads for different states during the week of the Democratic convention, but later replaced almost all of them with the same ad attacking Obama's record on China.

That was just last week. The new pair of ads were rolled out Monday.

Romney's campaign is spending more money on the ads now that they have access to funds raised for the general election. Over the summer, Romney also benefited from vast sums spent by independent groups on his behalf. Through last week, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS spent a combined $107.5 million on presidential election television advertising. That's $20 million more than Romney's campaign over the same time period, according to spending figures obtained by The Associated Press. Romney has also benefited from $46.5 million in television spending by Americans For Prosperity.

The Crossroads groups and Americans For Prosperity have long planned to balance their spending between the presidential contest and House and Senate races. Romney aides fear that the outside spending may now shift disproportionately toward the congressional races.

"We've always planned to spend substantially more on presidential level advocacy, but also spending significantly on House and Senate races," said Jonathan Collegio, spokesman for American Crossroads.

Thomas reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Steve Peoples in Washington and Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this report.

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Follow Kasie Hunt on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/kasie and Ken Thomas at http://www.twitter.com/AP_Ken_Thomas

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — If the presidential election were held today, Romney and Obama would be more or less tied, the latest polls show. But on one voter test, Obama has a clear advantage:

Who would you rather have a beer with?

Or, if you don't drink (as Romney doesn't), who would you rather have a glass of lemonade with? Or take with you on a road trip (with or without your dog)? Or invite over for dinner?

Simply put, there is a likability gap.

This may seem trivial compared to questions like, say, which candidate you think will better revive the economy or safeguard the nation's nuclear weapons. But election after election has demonstrated that how voters feel about their candidate matters. A lot. It buoyed Ronald Reagan and helped sink John Kerry.

Likability has become a political buzzword that stands for something deeper. More like affinity. Empathy. How well does he or she connect? How much does he understand people like me?

There are Republicans who think this will be the deciding issue for Mitt Romney. He has about as good a playing field as a challenger could hope for, yet has not broken past the president. The election, they believe, may well turn on whether Romney can use this week's convention and the fall debates to really connect with voters in a way he has not yet been able to.

Democrats see this as Obama's core asset. Even in these hard times, voters feel he gets their plight better than the rich guy does. Asked which candidate better understands the problems of people like you, Obama beats Romney among registered voters 51 to 36 percent in the latest AP/GfK poll. Some 53 percent of adults hold a "favorable" opinion of the president, compared with just 44 percent who view Romney favorably.

And that is a president who isn't actually all that touchy-feely himself, having at times been compared to the "Star Trek" alien Mr. Spock, who suppressed emotion in order to solve problems. In fact, Obama's personal ratings are lower than most presidential candidates in recent elections, notes polltaker Andrew Kohut. They are just better than Romney's.

That is Romney's challenge.

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CAN HE persuade voters to feel comfortable enough with him to turn out Obama? Not just to agree with him on issues but to trust him with their futures? That is why likability is about a lot more than having a beer.

It is about addressing what The Economist, a business-oriented British newsmagazine, editorialized as their "main doubt" about Romney: "Nobody knows who this strange man really is."

One striking element of this long campaign is how little Romney did over years of campaigning to really introduce himself, apparently not wanting to distract from discussion of the weak economy.

But Romney and his campaign were on course to use this convention to "warm up" his image. The candidate and his wife, Ann, sat down with Fox News at their home in New Hampshire the other day.

The correspondent, Chris Wallace, shared their pancakes as Ann described how Mitt had ironed his own shirt just that morning. "I noticed he was doing the laundry last night," she disclosed.

For his part, Romney did what he could to address the issue: "Remember that Popeye line, 'I am what I am and that's all what I am.'" What voters really want, he says, is effective management of the economy and for that he is your man.

In another interview, published by Politico on Monday, Romney acknowledged his likability problem but blamed it on the waves of attack ads Obama and his allies have launched against him (although his personal ratings were low even before the barrage).

He tried to turn the issue around on Obama, calling him a nice guy but a failed president.

In other words, American public, you liked Obama as a candidate but are disappointed in him as a president, while I, Romney, may be disappointing as your candidate but will deliver as your president.

Jon Stewart scoffed when George W. Bush (at that point a teetotaler) was described as a guy you'd love to have a beer with. I don't want a president I can have a beer with, Stewart said, "I want my president to be the designated driver." Given the highway pileup the American economy has just been through, Stewart's quip isn't all that far from Romney's campaign argument.

But can likability or affinity be separated from issues and effectiveness? That is becoming one of the principal questions of this campaign.

The question is sometimes posed as if managing the economy, on which Romney scores better, is different from the personal qualities that Obama scores better on. Some Republicans argue that Obama's personal ratings are all that keep him afloat amid the economic wreckage.

But that misses the point, says one Democratic consultant. Those personal qualities may actually be a way some voters connect politics to their economic facts of life.

"If you are part of the working class and you believe that the deck has been stacked against people like you for a decade or so," this consultant said, "who is likely to be the more 'desirable' remedy for that — the financial CEO who 'understands' the economy or the guy you think is fighting for people like you?"

Which is why fighting for you is an Obama campaign mantra.

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IN TRYING to overcome this, Romney is banging into a pretty deep vein of American political feeling. Ever since Andrew Jackson let his supporters traipse mud through the White House, there has been a resistance to letting the patricians back in power.

It took a huge economic crisis for Americans to elect the Hudson valley gentryman, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Herbert Hoover in fact was a good man, just a failed president, which is exactly what Romney is trying to say about Obama.

Romney's team has been planning to use the convention to highlight Obama's failure, as they see it, without denying the president's likability — and their own candidate's competence, as they see it, while acknowledging the need to humanize him.

This highlights the risk they have taken by waiting until so late in the campaign to try to personalize the candidate. Because Hurricane Isaac has intervened, in more ways than one.

On the obvious level, it has disrupted and overshadowed the convention so far. It has created a conversation about the last Republican administration's handling of a natural disaster when Romney would like to talk about the present Democratic administration's handling of the economy.

But as if to confirm that he is what he is (to channel Popeye again), the hurricane has created the kind of test for Romney that campaigns so often throw at candidates, a sudden change of terrain when the campaign was in the middle of doing something else.

These moments can be opportunities. What better chance to project empathy and connection than a looming threat to life and property? And Romney, Ann at his side, seemed to start out that way. The couple's thoughts, he said, were with the people in the storm's path, and he expressed hope that "they're spared any major destruction."

A more empathic politician might have left it at that, as his running mate, Paul Ryan, did. But Romney kept going, effusive about the convention and how it would go on despite the storm.

"I like my speech. I really like Ann's speech," he said. "Our sons are already in Tampa, and they say it's terrific there — a lot of great friends. And we're looking forward to a great convention."

Which, if his ear for connecting with people is as tin as it seems to be there, might be somewhat less likely than he hopes.

EDITOR'S NOTE — Michael Oreskes is senior managing editor for U.S. news at The Associated Press. Reach him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .