Romney Draws Huge Crowds
Romney campaign marked the start of the final weekend before Election Day.
Nov. 2, 2012 — -- The Romney campaign marked the start of the final weekend of the campaign with its biggest rally to date, featuring a joint appearance by the GOP ticket and a confab of some of its most influential surrogates.
Before Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan took the stage in front of more than 20,000 supporters, they paraded out the Republican Party's last presidential nominee John McCain, GOP stars like Marco Rubio and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, as well as two former GOP rivals, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
It was a pep rally of sorts at the Square at Union Centre before the surrogates fan out to battleground states in teams as the final hours leading up to Election Day on Tuesday approach. Aside from the GOP ticket and their wives, there were 42 surrogates, including the five Romney sons, on hand for Romney's closing pitch.
Romney, who spent the day campaigning in Wisconsin and Ohio, continued to characterize President Obama as a leader seeking to divide America with an ill-thought out agenda.
"Now throughout this campaign, President Obama has tried to convince you that these last four years have been a success," said Romney. "He's been floating a plan for the next four years. He wants to take all the things he did in his first term -- the stimulus, the borrowing, Obamacare, all the rest -- and try them all over again."
"But our big dreams will not be satisfied with a small agenda that's already failed us," he said. "And today, did you see what President Obama said today? He asked his supporters to vote for revenge. For revenge. Instead I ask the American people to vote for love of country."
Romney was referring to remarks by President Obama during a campaign rally in Ohio earlier today in which he urged the crowd to vote, quipping that "voting is the best revenge."
"It is absolutely essential that together we lead America to a better place than that," Romney said. "We're four days away from a fresh start. Four days away from the first day of a new beginning. My conviction that better days are ahead is not based on promises and hollow rhetoric but solid plans. And proven results. And it's based on an unshakeable faith in the American spirit."
Before Romney's remarks, some of the surrogates addressed the crowd, including former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who having been quite critical of Romney in the past tonight turned his attacks to the President.
"He has been a disaster," Giuliani said of Obama. "The worst President for our economy in our lifetime!"
Giuliani suggested that under a President Romney, "maybe something like what happened in Libya could have been avoided."
"Maybe if we had a president who was paying attention, we wouldn't be going through this investigation of what's being covered up about Libya," he added, to cheers from the crowd, added that the killing of the four Americans in Benghazi in September was the "result of incompetence."
Notably, Romney himself has not mentioned the incident in Libya since the foreign policy debate last month.
Romney's running mate, fresh off a day of campaigning of his own in Iowa and Colorado, noted the importance of the state of Ohio this Tuesday.
"This is our moment Ohio, this is the time when we want to wake up on Wednesday morning and see that we met the moment," said Ryan. "We want to make sure that we talked to everybody we know that thought hope and change sounded good, but they now know it didn't work. This is the time to elect a leader. This is the moment when the man and the moment are meeting perfectly. Mitt Romney is the right man for this moment!"
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