He did so one day after the president used a White House news conference to press Congressional Republicans to come to the table on a federal deficit compromise and asked voters to be patient about the painfully slow recovery.
Mr. Romney seized on the issue, telling reporters: “The plant here had been open 100 years; it survived the Great Depression. It couldn’t survive the Obama economy.”
“Now the president says, ‘Just give me more time’ and ‘It could have been worse,’?” Mr. Romney continued. “It couldn’t have been worse for the people who worked at this plant. For them, this is as bad as it gets.”
Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who leads in early polls for the Republican nomination, maintained his campaign strategy of positioning himself as nearly the inevitable nominee, directing criticism at Mr. Obama as if already focused on the general election more than a year away.
During the 15 minutes he spoke and took several questions, he never mentioned any of his Republican challengers. And rather than spending the day in a crucial early primary state, he made his first campaign trip to Pennsylvania, which usually votes Democratic in presidential elections, in a challenge to Mr. Obama.
The setting for this piece of political theater was the Allentown Metal Works, a steel plant that closed in January after struggling for years. Mr. Obama toured it in December 2009 as part of a swing through the Rust Belt to promote the slow turnaround of the economy under the $787 billion stimulus bill he had pushed through Congress. He said at the time that the stimulus had created or saved as many as 1.6 million jobs and gotten the economy moving again.
Mr. Romney was challenged by a reporter for having repeated in his campaign that Mr. Obama’s policies had worsened the recession, an assertion he made during a debate of Republican candidates in New Hampshire in June.
Mr. Romney backtracked from that statement. “What I said was the economy hasn’t turned around,” he said here. He added, “If you think the economy’s great and doing well, be my guest.”
Noting that when the stimulus passed the president predicted it would hold unemployment below 8 percent, Mr. Romney said: “We’re over 9 percent unemployment. That’s failure.”
Brad Woodhouse, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said Mr. Romney would “simply return to the same failed policies that nearly wrecked our economy and had our nation shedding nearly 800,000 jobs a month.”
Asked what he would tell Congress if he were in Mr. Obama’s shoes in the impasse over the federal deficit and the debt ceiling, Mr. Romney cited three imperatives: cut spending, cap spending and pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.
In a rejoinder to the president’s accusing Congressional Republicans on Wednesday of procrastinating on hard budget decisions, Mr. Romney took a swipe at Mr. Obama for leaving Washington on Thursday to appear at two fund-raising events in Philadelphia. (He did not mention that he, too, had two fund-raisers scheduled in the area.)
Mr. Obama, who appeared at a fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee in Philadelphia, criticized the attacks by the Republican presidential field.
“They won’t have a plan, but they’ll attack,” he said. “The American people are a lot less interested in us attacking each other. They’re more interested in us attacking the country’s problems.”
Throughout Mr. Romney’s brief appearance here, he clearly relished the irony of the setting. He repeated several variations of his statement that Mr. Obama had visited the plant “a year and a half ago and indicated that this was a symbol of the success of his stimulus program.”
At the time of the president’s visit, he never specifically promised stimulus funds would include money for Allentown Metal Works. The century-old plant that had already seen its work force reduced to 65 from more than 100 by then, according to local reports.
One person who does not fault Mr. Obama for the plant’s failure is John Hydro, the last full-time employee, who works as a watchman as machinery from the former fabrication shops is disassembled to be sold off. “Cheap foreign labor killed us, basically,” said Mr. Hydro, 66, who has worked here 21 years. “You can’t blame it on the president.”
Sean Collins Walsh contributed reporting from Philadelphia.
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