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NORTH CANTON, Ohio (AP) — Republican Mitt Romney's presidential campaign is staying on the offensive in the increasingly heated debate over the future of Medicare, the health care program relied upon by millions of seniors.

"The president was talking about Medicare yesterday. I'm excited about this," Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan, said Thursday. "This is a debate we want to have, this is a debate we need to have and this is a debate we're going to win."

The Wisconsin congressman's addition to the GOP ticket this past weekend drew immediate scrutiny to a budget proposal he drafted that proposes to transform Medicare into a voucher-like system for future retirees.

In turn, Romney and Ryan called attention to President Barack Obama's health care law, which is funded in part by future savings from Medicare, and accused him of "raiding" the program of billions of dollars.

"What he probably did not mention yesterday is that when he passed his signature health care achievement, Obamacare, he raided $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare," Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, said. "This will lead to fewer services for seniors."

What Ryan doesn't mention is that his budget proposal includes the same savings, which are supposed to be realized through lower payments to hospitals and doctors, and by making the program more efficient.

Romney has said he would restore the Medicare cuts.

Obama says the Republicans' proposal "ends Medicare as we know it," arguing that changes he's made, including to help seniors pay less for drugs and reduce wasteful spending, will make the program stronger financially.

"I've strengthened Medicare," Obama declared Wednesday a two separate campaign appearances in Iowa.

The Medicare debate continues as Romney's campaign presses ahead with efforts to undermine Obama's personal likability, one of his greatest assets, by trying to portray the outwardly calm president as someone seething with animosity and a lust for power.

Ryan carried the theme in his only public appearance Thursday, his second consecutive day of campaigning in the politically important state of Ohio. He said Obama was running a campaign marked by "frustration" and "anger" because he's out of new ideas and has resorted to "fear and smear" to try to win a second term.

Romney had charged a day earlier that "division and attack and hatred" were fueling Obama's campaign.

To help make their case, Romney's campaign has been highlighting a recent remark by Vice President Joe Biden that prompted some critics to suggest he was using racial undertones to gain political advantage.

Responding to Republican criticism that the Obama administration had sought to regulate Wall Street too tightly, Biden told a Virginia campaign audience that included hundreds of black supporters that the GOP wanted to "unchain Wall Street." He added: "They're going to put y'all back in chains."

Obama defended Biden, telling People magazine Wednesday that the vice president's only meaning was that consumers won't be protected if Wall Street reforms are repealed.

"In no sense was he trying to connote something other than that," Obama said.

The president wrapped up a three-day bus tour through Iowa on Wednesday, devoting attention to the state that helped launch his bid for the White House in 2008. He was joined by first lady Michelle Obama for the first time in months.

Obama and Biden were spending Thursday at the White House. Romney was raising money in South Carolina.

Obama resumes campaigning Saturday with a pair of stops in New Hampshire.

DENVER (AP) — Paul Ryan likes exercise, budget charts and the Green Bay Packers. Joe Biden likes train rides, foreign policy and talking — a lot.

In some ways, these presidential ticket No. 2s could not be more different. They are separated in age by nearly three decades, were born to families in different regions of the country and have views on opposite ends of the political spectrum.

But in other ways, the 42-year-old Republican congressman and 69-year-old Democratic vice president are very much alike. Both were born to Catholic families in working-class neighborhoods and were young stars in their parties who became experts on the inner workings of Washington.

And perhaps above all, these men both do political things their respective No. 1s cannot.

Biden, with his back-slapping image, big smile and hardscrabble roots in Scranton, Pa., is seen as more effective than President Barack Obama at courting white working-class voters. Ryan, while less known outside his Janesville, Wis., hometown, is a favorite of the Republican Party's conservative base, a group that long has been skeptical of Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney's conservative credentials.

Over the next three months, Biden and Ryan will play key roles in the White House race, raising money, criticizing the opponent and helping lend credibility in complicated policy debates — Biden on foreign policy and Ryan on federal budgeting. They will also inevitably create headaches for their bosses, as Biden did this week when he told a Virginia crowd that included hundreds of black people that Romney's plans for Wall Street would put them "back in chains."

Mostly, their job: Sell the boss to Americans — and tear down the other guy.

Routinely, Biden says Obama has "a backbone like a ramrod" and says he considers himself Obama's older brother. He also unleashes scathing attacks against Romney and, now, Ryan, including his proposals to overhaul Medicare.

Ryan, just days into his new role, has said repeatedly of Romney that he's "the kind of man who you want to serve as your president. He's the kind of man who, when he gets involved, he fixes things." And he lambasts Obama, saying he's "spending our children into a diminished future."

When talking to voters, both often offer personal touches.

While visiting a firehouse in Hillsborough, N.C., to thank firemen for the work they do, Biden shared the story of his first wife's and daughter's deaths in a car accident. Then, at high school football practice in Danville, Va., he offered some of his father's favorite words: "When you get knocked down, get up!"

With a football in his hand, the silver-haired Biden told players that when he played high school football he weighed about 158 pounds but with pads he clocked in at 175. Asked if he was ready to suit up and play, the vice president declared, "I'm ready to go!"

It was a moment of connection for a man who has maintained his everyman appeal, despite having worked nearly 40 years in Washington. Elected to the Senate at 30, he commuted by train more than two hours most days to and from Delaware to see his family. An Amtrak station in Wilmington, Del., was named in his honor last year.

Biden's kids have long since grown up. Two of them are about the same age as Ryan. But he often refers to his grandchildren on the campaign trail, including one story that he uses to accuse Republicans of creating the country's economic mess: "As my youngest granddaughter, Natalie, says, 'Who do they think did that, Casper the ghost?'"

Ryan became a congressman at just 28 and is nearing the end of his seventh term. He's been sharing stories about camping, his exercise routine and demolition derby as he has crisscrossed six states — Virginia, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada and Ohio — on Romney's behalf this week.

He chatted about cow milking during a brief tour of the Iowa State Fair on Monday. The next day, his young children — and love for the outdoors — figured prominently in a speech in Colorado, where he took his family camping last summer.

Ryan said he showed his kids — Liza, 10, and sons Charles, 8, and Sam, 7 — how to cook a meal on a campfire and make s'mores. Later, he and his wife, Janna, put the kids to bed in a tent.

"We stayed up late and we talked about our country," Ryan said. "There's nothing like the stars and the skies of the Colorado Rockies at night. We looked at our kids and we know they are our future. But today, we look at our kids and we know, without a shadow of a doubt, that we are mortgaging their future."

When he makes comments like these, Ryan exudes a certain cheery authenticity. He is a former personal trainer, a skier and hiker known for his devotion to the workout routine known as P90X. The Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, Ryan is someone who draws budget graphs on napkins. He defends complicated Medicare plans with a boyish charm that prompted New York Times liberal columnist Maureen Dowd to call him "the cutest package that cruelty ever came in."

"Ryan strikes me as a policy wonk who's not a nerd," said Steve Duprey, a member of the Republican National Committee from New Hampshire.

Where Ryan's forte is the budget, Biden is an expert on foreign policy, having served as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee. Neither Romney nor Ryan has significant foreign policy experience.

Biden has significant credibility in the foreign policy realm, despite a tendency to stray off message.

His use of profanity was betrayed when television cameras captured him mouthing a colorful congratulations to Obama after the passage of his health care law. And just this week, he told a Virginia crowd that Obama needed their help to win North Carolina and referred to the country being in the 20th century — when it's the 21st century.

Biden made a more significant misstep while criticizing Romney's plans to eliminate new Wall Street regulations. "Unchain Wall Street," Biden told a crowd that included hundreds of blacks. "They're going to put y'all back in chains." Romney seized on the comments as proof Obama's campaign is driven by "division and attack and hatred."

Former Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Va., who introduced Biden at a rally this week, said the vice presidential campaign was a study in contrasts. Biden may be a generation older than Ryan, he said, but the vice president "hasn't missed a step."

"He may not work out as aggressively as Paul Ryan, but both of them are plenty fit," Perriello said.

Introducing Ryan this week, former Colorado Rep. Bob Beauprez said that there's one important thing to remember about Ryan: "He ain't Joe Biden."

Daly reported from Blacksburg, Va.

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.