US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and newly-minted running mate Paul Ryan have hit the road on a bus tour across must-win US states, selling themselves to voters as the duo who can win the White House and "save the American dream".
Fresh from a surprise early morning roll-out of Romney's vice presidential pick in Norfolk, Virginia, the Republican pair struck out across the state pushing a policy of fiscal responsibility and savaging President Barack Obama as a job-killer bent on changing the country for the worse.
Romney's pick, cast as a bold move by his party, is sure to transform the presidential race less than three months before November's election, and the two men electrified crowds as they took to the stump on Saturday.
The campaign also aims to sharply alter the trajectory of debate away from Romney's business record, taxes and image as an out-of-touch multi-millionaire investor and towards larger wholesale issues such as how to revitalise the nation's sputtering economy.
"We can turn this thing around," Ryan, 42, told cheering supporters in Norfolk.
"High unemployment, declining incomes and crushing debt is not a new normal. It's the result of misguided policies.
Ryan, a seven-term US congressman from Wisconsin, constantly made pointed criticisms of Obama and his policies.
At subsequent stops, in Ashland and then Manassas, where the Republican campaign said the rowdy crowd topped 8000 people, the tip of Ryan's verbal spear grew sharper.
Obama has been pushing a "government-centred society with a government-run economy", Ryan said, rallying supporters in Manassas, outside Washington DC.
"It's not working," Ryan said of Obama's economic policy. "It's never worked before. We were promised equal opportunity, not equal outcomes."
In recent weeks, Romney has slumped behind Obama in opinion polls, with the incumbent taking a clear lead nationally and in most of the dozen swing states that will decide the November 6 election.
A Fox News national poll, released on Thursday, put Obama at 49 per cent to Romney's 40, while a CNN poll had Obama at 52 per cent, seven points up on the former Massachusetts governor.
But by picking Ryan, a favourite of "small government" conservatives, and embarking on a four-day bus tour across battleground states - expanded to five to allow voters in Wisconsin to laud their native son on Sunday - Romney hopes to gain the upper hand in the race.
The pair went on the offensive in Ashland, with Romney ominously criticising Obama as "a president who's trying to change America ... into something we might not recognise".
Romney also blamed the Obama campaign for the bitterly negative tone of the race.
By contrast, Romney praised his running mate as an "intellectual leader in our party", someone who earned respect from Republicans and Democrats alike for having "made friends on both sides of the aisle (in the US House of Representatives)".
Romney sought to forge Ryan's identity as a responsible hero of fiscal conservatism before the opposition had a chance to do otherwise.
Ryan chairs the House Budget Committee, and this year unveiled a budget plan, widely backed by Republicans, that slashes federal spending, lowers taxes for individuals and corporations and overhauls entitlement programs like the Medicare and Medicaid healthcare plans.
Obama's Democrats immediately went on the attack, alleging that the cuts would hurt those who rely on such aid to pay for healthcare, including the elderly.
"Mitt Romney has chosen a leader of the House Republicans who shares his commitment to the flawed theory that new budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, while placing greater burdens on the middle class and seniors, will somehow deliver a stronger economy," Obama campaign manager Jim Messina said.
With Congress saddled by its lowest approval ratings on record and Ryan's status as a Washington insider - he was first elected at age 28 - he may, like Romney, have his work cut out to appeal to ordinary voters.
But an "excited" Ryan vowed to "win this campaign".
"We've got the wind behind us," he told reporters aboard the campaign plane as it flew from the Washington suburbs to Charlotte, North Carolina.
The decision to pick Ryan was welcomed by Senator John McCain, who lost to Obama in 2008. He said the Republican ticket now featured the "strongest team to return America to prosperity and to defend our interests abroad".
Top conservatives like former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and potential VP pick Marco Rubio, the freshman senator from Florida, hailed Romney's choice as inspired.
"Quite simply, Mitt Romney could not have made a finer choice for the future direction of our country," House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said.
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