Obama: Give me time to finish the job
UPDATED 1:24 p.m. ET
(CBS News) -- President Obama's re-election team unveiled a new ad Monday, striking back at the presumptive challenger Mitt Romney's assertion that Mr. Obama's three-plus years in power have been a failure.
The 60-second ad, which is slated to run in nine key battleground states, makes the case that Mr. Obama has made progress reviving the economy and creating jobs and needs more time to bring it to full speed. The campaign plans to spend $25 million to run the ad in the key states that could decide the election.
"Some said our best days were behind us, but not him," the narrator intones before showing a clip of Mr. Obama telling a crowd, "don't bet against the American worker."
Mr. Obama "believed in us. Fought for us," the announcer says before reciting a list of the president's accomplishments, including a resuscitation of the American auto industry, the end of the Iraq war and the killing of Osama bin Laden.
"We are not there yet. It is still too hard for too many. But we are coming back because America's greatness comes from a strong middle class. Because you don't quit and neither does he," the ad says, citing more than 4.2 million new jobs created since 2009.
The president officially kicked off his re-election campaign over the weekend with rallies in Virginia and Ohio.
A poll released Monday showed Mr. Obama losing ground to Romney in a dozen key battleground states. According to a USA Today/Gallup poll, the president leads Romney by just two percentage points, 47 percent to 45 percent. In late March, he had a nine point lead over the former Massachusetts governor.
Another poll, conducted for George Washington University and Politico, showed Romney leading the president by 10 percentage points among independents and by two points overall.
Among women, Mr. Obama's lead fell to 12 percentage points from 19 percentage points in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin in the USA Today/Gallup poll.
Asked about that gender gap, senior campaign adviser David Axelrod told reporters the president's record on issues that matter to women works in his favor, citing the first bill he signed while in office that makes it harder for employers to pay women less than men for comparable work.
"Contraception obviously is another place where, you know, Governor Romney would take us back 50 years," Axelrod said.
"These kinds of issues are defining and they are showing up in these polls there's just such a fundamentally different orientation on the part of these two candidates so I don't think that these numbers are accidental and I also don't think they're reversible. Governor Romney's positions are not the right positions for women in the 21st century," he said.
Romney campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg said Mr. Obama has not lived up to his promises.
"President Obama would like for voters to believe he hasn't been president for the last three years," she said, adding "Mitt Romney will get our country back on track and stop the middle-class squeeze of the Obama economy."