Romney and Obama hold dueling appearances in Ohio If in the unlikely case they haven't grasped their significance in the upcoming presidential election, voters in the mighty swing state of Ohio will be getting a big reminder Thursday about the outsized role they're expected to play in November. President Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will make dueling midday appearances in the state. It is believed to be the first time in this cycle that both candidates will be in the same state at precisely the same time. Not that their audiences would overlap. Obama is slated to speak at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland at 1:45 p.m. local time. His campaign staff has billed the speech as an effort to "frame the choice" on two contrasting economic visions and the future of the middle class rather than an attempt to reset an agenda that is seen in some quarters to be faltering as the economy continues to teeter, and the formidable Obama fundraising operation was bested last month by Romney. Obama and the Democratic National Committee raised $60 million to Romney and the Republican National Committee's $76.8 million. Five minutes after the president is slated to begin his speech in Cleveland, Romney is scheduled to begin a rally at Seilkop Industries, a Cincinnati company that makes precision parts. Wednesday, his campaign strategist Russ Schriefer told reporters that Romney planned to offer a blueprint for his first 100 days in office. He will reprise many familiar vows of his stump speech: moving the Keystone Pipeline forward, granting waivers to states to abandon the president's health care reform law, cutting regulations, overhauling the tax system, among other things he says will get the economy going. On Wednesday, Romney even predicted what Obama will tell Ohioans. In a speech before a group of top business executives in Washington D.C., the former Massachusetts governor predicted Obama would backtrack on some recent statements, notably his remark to reporters last Friday that "the private sector is doing fine." Speaking to the Business Roundtable, Romney said Obama is hostile to job creators and repeated words uttered Friday by the president that were seen by many as an unfortunate gaffe. "He said, as you know, just a few days ago that the private sector is doing fine," said Romney, "but the incredulity that came screaming back from the American people, I think, has caused him to rethink that, and I think you're gonna see him change course tomorrow, where he will acknowledge that it isn't going to well." In context, as many commentators have noted, Obama's statement that the private sector is doing fine made sense because he was comparing it to the public sector, which continues to shed jobs as local governments contend with dramatic budget shortfalls. By comparison, the private sector has added jobs, though at an anemic pace. Politically speaking, however, the president delivered an exploitable sound bite on a silver platter, and Romney and his surrogates have tried hard to keep Obama's unfortunate phraseology in the news. The Obama campaign called Romney's characterization of the president's record "dishonest." "In another in a long line of "major" economic speeches, Mitt Romney made dishonest after dishonest claim about the President's record and failed to offer any new ideas of his own on how to improve the economy and strengthen the middle class," said Obama spokeswoman Lis Smith. Contrary to Romney's rhetoric, the President took our nation from losing 750,000 jobs a month to adding 4.3 million private sector jobs over the last 27 months, worked to reduce burdensome business regulations, and has put forward a plan to create more jobs and reduce the deficit while asking every American to pay their fair share. Though Obama will dip into Ohio only briefly this week, Romney plans to return at the end of the week. Friday, he launches a five-day bus tour, concentrating on swing states. He'll start in New Hampshire, then travel to Pennsylvania and back to Ohio on Sunday, where he'll attend a Father's Day pancake breakfast in the town of Brunswick, southwest of Cleveland. The bus is scheduled to visit another important swing state, Wisconsin, on Monday and Romney's home state of Michigan on Tuesday.