In Florida, Obama Presents Romney as Bad Choice for Seniors

President Obama spoke at a campaign event on Thursday in Jacksonville, Fla.

After weeks of focusing on Mr. Romney’s private-sector business deals, Mr. Obama turned to another front by assailing Republican plans to repeal his health care law and transform Medicare into a voucher program. Democrats have long used Medicare as a wedge issue to galvanize older voters in Florida against Republicans.

“He plans to roll back health care reform, forcing more than 200,000 Floridians to pay more for their prescription drugs,” Mr. Obama told thousands of supporters who responded with shouts of “No.” “He plans to turn Medicare into a voucher program. So if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy the health insurance that’s on the market, you’re out of luck. You’re on your own.”

Noting that Mr. Romney also favors more expansive tax cuts, Mr. Obama added: “Now, Florida, that’s the wrong way to go. It’s wrong to ask seniors to pay more for Medicare just so millionaires and billionaires can pay less in taxes.”

Mr. Romney, campaigning in Massachusetts on Thursday, scheduled three interviews with Florida radio stations to counter the president’s visit here. “The president is extraordinarily out of touch with how America’s economy works and with how individuals pursuing their dreams in this country have built America,” he told a Tampa station. “The president thinks that it’s government that should take responsibility for all the successful businesses in this country. And the truth is, it is not government.”

Mr. Obama has found it hard to gain traction in Florida, according to recent polls, and Republicans greeted him Thursday with television advertisements accusing him of trying to distract attention from stubbornly high unemployment and mediocre economic growth.

“Barack Obama can’t run on his failed economic record so his whole strategy is trying to put his opponent through the shredder — and even that’s failing because his attacks are misleading,” said Jonathan Collegio, communications director for American Crossroads, a well-financed group broadcasting one of the ads in Florida and other battleground states.

Mr. Obama’s trip to Florida is his third here in recent weeks and the seventh of the year. After Jacksonville, a city that just elected its first African-American mayor and that sits in a county Mr. Obama lost by just 8,000 votes four years ago, the president heads to West Palm Beach, where he will address an audience of seniors. On Friday, he travels to Fort Myers and Orlando.

Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney are effectively tied in Florida, whose 29 electoral votes are considered potentially decisive. A poll conducted for The Miami Herald, The Tampa Times and other news organizations last week found that 46 percent of likely Florida voters support Mr. Obama, and 45 percent support Mr. Romney. Particularly worrisome for the president: more Florida voters than not believe his policies have made the economy worse and want his health care law repealed.

The president is using his trip to argue the opposite, that his policies have made significant if insufficient progress in rebuilding an economy wracked by financial crisis and that the health care law benefits older Floridians.

Florida seniors saved an average of $600 last year on prescription drug costs because the Obama health care law helped close the so-called doughnut hole in coverage, the Obama campaign said in a three-page primer. The law also helped seniors with free preventive care and annual wellness visits.

As for Medicare, the president took aim at Mr. Romney’s support for a fiscal plan advanced by Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who leads the House Budget Committee. The Ryan plan would overhaul Medicare by providing recipients vouchers to obtain health care insurance on the private market. Mr. Obama argued that the vouchers would never cover the full cost, and so the plan would ultimately cost seniors thousands of dollars a year.

With attacks like that, the Obama campaign remains hopeful it can keep Florida in his column in the fall, but it acknowledged that it would at best remain a tight contest here. In addition to seniors, the president hopes to appeal to Hispanic Americans with his immigration stance as well as the longtime Democratic base of African-Americans.

“What’s unique about Florida,” said Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, who was traveling with the president on Thursday, “is we have demographic groups that I think are going to be particularly moved by the dramatic contrast between Mitt Romney’s record and his proposals, and President Obama’s record and the direction he wants to continue to move this country in.”