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ORANGE CITY, Iowa - In his first public campaign event in five days, Mitt Romney gave a scathing review of President Obama's convention speech, referring to it as "extraordinarily, surprisingly disappointing."

"I was surprised by his address because I expected him to confront the major challenges of the last four years, which is an economy which has not produced the jobs that the American people need," said Romney, who said that he had read, but didn't watch, Obama's speech last night.

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"I expected him to talk about 23 million people, or at least to talk about the unemployed in America. I expected him to talk about the number of families having a hard time making ends meet. The number of middle income families who have seen the cost of health care insurance go up, the cost of food go up, the cost of gasoline go up, even as their incomes have gone down, I expected him to talk about these things," said Romney.

"No. Instead it was a whole series of new promises that he ultimately won't be able to keep because the policies he believes in and the direction he's pulling will not make America stronger. If President Obama were reelected we would have four more years of the last four years and the American people are going to say no to that."

"Now you might have expected the president of the United States to lay out a plan of what he would do to get the economy going again, and get people working again and he didn't do that last night," Romney continued. "Again, that was surprising to me. I laid out the things that I'm going to do to get this economy going."

Romney, speaking in a state with one of the nation's lowest unemployment rates, said that while he's "trying to look beyond" the bad news from this morning's jobs report, it was still "simply unimaginable."

"The president said that by this time we'd be at 5.4 percent unemployment…instead, we're at about 8 percent. And you know the difference that that makes in how many people would be working in America? Nine million people. Had he been able to keep his promise, had his, had his policies worked as he thought they would, there'd be 9 million more Americans working," said Romney.

Romney heads next to the swing state of New Hampshire, where Obama just wrapped up a campaign even of his own.