Rob Portman and Pat Toomey Go to Bat for Mitt Romney

With President Barack Obama hitting the battleground states of Ohio and Pennsylvania, the team behind former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, sent out two senators from those states -- including one of the leading candidates to wind up as Romneys running mate -- to take aim at the president.

U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who is listed by pundits in the first tier of possibilities for Romney to add to the ticket, joined U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., in bashing Obama.

This week, President Obama will visit our states as he campaigns for re-election. We welcome him, and we hope he takes time to learn about how the private sector is actually doing and about the challenges facing our constituents in Ohio and Pennsylvania, the senators wrote in a memo released by the Romney team. What he will no doubt hear from them is a sense of overwhelming frustration. Voters want an explanation: Why did he fail to live up to the many promises he made to them in his last campaign and during his time in office?

As both a candidate and newly-inaugurated president, President Obama outlined a number of specific, quantifiable promises. He said he intended to be judged by these promises, and urged voters to hold him accountable, they continued. In February 2009, he declared of improving the economy, If I dont have this done in three years, then theres going to be a one-term proposition. When the president pushed his trillion-dollar stimulus bill, he and his team promised it would reduce the unemployment rate to around 5.6 percent by today. Of course, in reality, weve endured an unemployment rate above 8 percent for 40 straight months -- the worst employment numbers in 30 years and a clear policy failure.

Today, the unemployment rate is 8.2 percent, 2.6 percentage points higher than promised. What would it mean if he had delivered on that promise: 8.4 million more Americans would have jobs, the senators insisted. This is a promise gap: a clear and demonstrable difference between what the president promised to voters and what he actually delivered. He made a promise on nearly every critical issue of the day -- employment, energy, health-care, housing, and the deficit -- that our lives would be better off today if his policies were enacted. By his own standards, he has fallen far short on each and every issue. And by his own admission, such shortcomings are cause for Americans to make his presidency a one-term proposition.