The Republican challenger was to tell tens of millions of voters watching the televised showdown in Colorado that Obama had failed them after being handed an eve-of-debate gift by Biden.
Mitt Romney was poised to use the first US presidential debate on Wednesday to attack Barack Obama with the words of his own vice-president, after Joe Biden said middle-class America had been buried for the past four years.
The Republican challenger was to tell tens of millions of voters watching the televised showdown in Colorado that Obama had failed them after being handed an eve-of-debate gift by Biden. The gaffe-prone vice-president asked supporters at a rally in North Carolina how Romney could justify raising taxes on a middle class that has been buried the last four years.
Romney agreed. "The middle class has been buried the last four years, which is why we need a change in November," he said on Twitter.
Biden later said he was referring to the effects of earlier Republican policies.
However, the slip allowed the former Massachusetts governor to redouble his message that the president was to blame for the near-stagnant state of the economy and an unemployment crisis that has left 23?million jobless or seeking more work.
Romney, who has been criticised for failing to present specific economic proposals, offered a glimpse of his plans by saying in an interview that the generous tax deductions households can claim against mortgage interest payments and health care costs should be capped at $17,000 (pounds 10,500) a year.
He also received a boost from new opinion polls indicating that Obama's leads in the crucial battleground states of Florida and Virginia had shrunk to three and two percentage points respectively.
Romney still trails by eight points in Ohio, according to the NBC/WSJ survey. He will almost certainly need to win two of the three states to take the White House in November.
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