An Obama campaign video shows the president’s national political director, Katherine Archuleta, tearfully crediting Mr. Obama with having saved her daughter’s life. She portrays the president as a hero of government whose health care law assures her daughter, a cancer survivor, insurance coverage forever. A video by a political committee backing Mr. Romney follows a nearly identical tack: evocative music and a tearful description of Mr. Romney as “the man who helped save my daughter.” But the testimonial, from a former partner at Bain Capital, depicts Mr. Romney as a hero of business who once shut down his firm to aid search efforts until the partner’s missing teenager was found. Those competing stories are rooted in more than the biographies of the Democratic incumbent, a former professor and community organizer, and his Republican challenger, a onetime financial industry titan. They also reflect the divergent ideologies and core constituencies of the two parties. Mr. Obama champions government as a linchpin of future economic growth and the average American’s protector from the excesses and failures of the free market. Mr. Romney condemns government as a menace whose excesses and failures imperil the free market’s ability to enhance individual opportunity and make the nation prosperous. Each has more negative than positive material to work with. Their back-and-forth is a clash between institutions reduced to equal levels of public disdain after years of economic weakness, Wall Street’s collapse and bailout, high unemployment levels and shifting election outcomes. A Pew Research Center poll found in February that only 22 percent of Americans rated the federal government as having a positive effect on American life — precisely the same proportion who rated banks and other financial institutions positively. “It’s clearly a standoff,” said Pew’s pollster, Andrew Kohut, though one involving coalitions of different shapes. Blacks and Hispanics were twice as likely as whites to rate government positively, for example, and nearly four times as likely as white evangelicals. Mr. Obama’s argument draws stronger support from single women, Mr. Romney’s from white men and married women. The contours of the partisan debate have grown familiar since Ronald Reagan called government the problem, not the solution, and the 2000 election established how closely it divides the nation. But each side sees an opening for a breakthrough in November. For the Romney team, it is the juxtaposition of a Democratic incumbent struggling with hard times against a Republican candidate uniquely suited to extend the arc of conservative ascendancy that began with Reagan’s antigovernment campaign in 1980. “We haven’t had a candidate that’s been as successful from a business standpoint as Romney has been,” said Carl Forti, a strategist for the pro-Romney “super PAC” that produced the advertisement featuring his business partner. As hostile as swing voters may be toward Wall Street and big corporations, he added, “they absolutely know government’s worse.” For Mr. Obama’s advisers, the opening lies in their ability to tie Mr. Romney to the market’s generation-long failure to deliver rising living standards to average Americans. “The country tried everything Romney says, and it brought the economy to the brink of collapse,” said Mr. Obama’s pollster, Joel Benenson. “The American people know our country has a big role to play in investing in education, in R&D to produce new industries and in infrastructure.” That explains the Obama campaign’s recent attack on Mr. Romney’s record at Bain Capital. An Obama campaign video with sorrowful former steelworkers cast Mr. Romney as a corporate “vampire” who with his partners bought a Missouri manufacturer, siphoned away profits for themselves and bankrupted it. Mr. Obama’s defense this week of his campaign’s Bain attacks underscored the ideological clash. The president asserted that pursuit of private-sector profits was insufficient preparation for service as chief executive of government, who is obliged to consider the interests of all constituents, including workers. The Romney campaign answered that tale of villainy with one of heroism. Its ad highlighted a different company that “Mitt Romney’s private-sector leadership team” helped start, creating 6,000 jobs. “If that’s not the American dream, I don’t know what is,” a grateful worker concluded. The route to the American dream sketched by Mr. Obama involves critical assistance from the government. In an interactive Obama campaign graphic, the fictional character “Julia” benefits from programs like Head Start, small-business subsidies and the new health care law. The campaign recently spent $1 million on a targeted mailing to women in swing states trumpeting benefits they would lose if Mr. Romney won a repeal of the health law. Mr. Romney dismissed the “Julia” device as an illustration of the centrality of government to Mr. Obama’s vision. He said at a rally this year, “If you’re looking for free stuff you don’t have to pay for, vote for the other guy.” Mr. Obama promotes the two-year-old financial regulation law as protection against the depredations of Wall Street, with all the more urgency after JPMorgan Chase’s recent multibillion-dollar trading loss. Mr. Romney insists that the law inhibits private-sector-led growth and supports its repeal. He takes the same view of the government’s involvement in bailing out auto companies, saying it rewarded unions friendly to Democrats at the taxpayers’ expense; his campaign’s new Web video features nonunion workers complaining that Washington had not helped them. Mr. Obama says the government bailout saved the industry. Both sides supplement philosophical arguments with practical ones. Mr. Romney casts the administration’s interventions as simply ineffective; Mr. Obama’s campaign says Mr. Romney failed to deliver on jobs and government-slimming promises as governor of Massachusetts. Yet they consistently offer voters a fundamental contrast of outlook. Mr. Obama wants government to enhance opportunity and temper inequality through investments in education, research, infrastructure and new energy technologies — paid for with help from higher taxes on the wealthy. Mr. Romney, speaking in Des Moines last week, articulated the opposite view. “The private sector is by far the most efficient and cost-effective” at generating economic growth, Mr. Romney said. “As President Obama and old-school liberals absorb more and more of our economy into government, they make what we do more expensive, less efficient and less useful.” “They make America less competitive,” he concluded. “You do not owe Washington a bigger share of your paycheck.”
