With five months to go until the 2012 presidential election, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney took the tone of the contest down a couple of notches, hitting the airwaves and going online to rip into each other.

The Obama team Tuesday launched a new television ad in key battleground states -- including Florida -- that attacks Romney’s record during his tenure as governor of Massachusetts. The ad attempts to play a little political jujitsu, taking Romney’s attacks and turning them against him, slamming the Republican’s record on running up government debt and on job creation.




Besides Florida, the ad is running in eight other states that Obama carried in 2008 but that Romney is looking to pick up in November: Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

Meanwhile, the Romney camp is striking back in video attacks of its own.

Earlier in the week, the Romney camp took aim at Obama for saying that the private sector was doing “fine” despite the continuing economic slowdown. The Romney team released a Web video contrasting Obama’s statement with accounts from Americans who have been hit hard by the economic downturn.



The Romney camp followed up with another video released Monday which bashes Obama on unemployment. This Web video notes that the national unemployment rate went up to 8.2 percent while then adding the clip of Obama insisting “the private sector is doing fine.”



The Romney camp looked to continue to make political hay out of Obama’s comment that the private sector was doing fine on Tuesday, noting that Democrats were going out of their way to say that they did not agree with the president on the matter.

“President Obama must be feeling increasingly isolated these days after eight of his fellow Democrats refused to back his claim that the private sector is ‘doing fine.’ Those Democrats – just like all Americans – understand that 23 million Americans are struggling for work, and family wealth sits at its lowest level in two decades,” said Amanda Henneberg, a spokeswoman for Romney, on Tuesday. “From day one, Mitt Romney will help get Americans back to work and the economy moving again.”

In the meantime, the two campaigns continue to try to woo Hispanic voters. On Monday, both sides released Spanish-language commercials in an attempt to win that increasingly important population.

Earlier this week, the labor organization Service Employees International Union (SEIU) teamed up with Democrat-backing super-PAC Priorities USA Action to release ads bashing Romney in Spanish that are running in key states -- including Florida.




"If elected president, Mitt Romney’s policies would be devastating to Latino families,” insisted noted Democrat strategist Paul Begala who is an adviser for  Priorities USA Action. “In a Romney administration, the tax burden would shift onto middle-class families in order to protect corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Romney’s vision is a blow to the middle class: slash education, repeal health care reform and undermine Social Security and Medicare at a time when we need it most.”

“This ad is part of a broader effort to ensure Latino voters know the stakes in this election and who has been on the side of Latino families and who will continue to stand with them in the coming years,” said Brandon Davis, the national political director of SEIU. “The contrast could not be more clear. President Obama is committed to focusing on good job creation, ending devastating cuts to programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, calling on the rich and large corporations to pay their fair share in taxes and creating a fair pathway to citizenship for immigrants. Mitt Romney’s policies would be detrimental to job growth, hurt Latino workers' chances of finding a job that gives fair pay for a day’s work, and help the very richest simply get that much richer.”

The Romney camp launched an ad of their own trying to woo Hispanic voters on Monday. The ad was more positive than some of the other recent ones, offering an introduction for Hispanic voters to the Republican candidate.



Polls at the national and state levels have shown Hispanics leaning toward backing Obama.



Reach Kevin Derby at kderby@sunshinestatenews.com or at (850) 727-0859.