Republicans sought to portray their party as the best option to revamp the U.S. economy while denouncing President Barack Obama’s record ahead of the Republican National Convention, which began this week.

Voters care about the “economic and fiscal crisis,” Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin said on CNN’s “State of the Union” broadcast yesterday. “That’s what Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan bring to the table,” he said, referring to the party’s presumptive presidential and vice presidential nominees, respectively.

Obama and the Democrats want the campaign to be about “anything but the administration’s record,” said former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour on CBS’s “Face the Nation” broadcast. The election is “a referendum on Obama,” he said.

Republicans have portrayed Romney and Ryan as the candidates with the experience and vision to boost economic growth and establish fiscal discipline. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, made a fortune in the private sector, and Ryan, a congressman from Wisconsin, has introduced a plan on Capitol Hill to reduce federal spending and reform Medicare and Social Security.

“This should be a campaign of substance and big things rather than distractions and little things,” Jeb Bush, the Republican former governor of Florida, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” broadcast. Romney is a “practical person who’s had life experience based on solving problems,” he said.

Obama “can’t look at the American people with a straight face and say, ‘You are better off today than you were four years ago,’” Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, said on the CBS Sunday morning program.

“I want to make sure that we get the country back on track,” Romney said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.” Democrats led by Obama have run a campaign that has “been about dividing the American people,” he said. The “character assassination and divisiveness” of the president’s re-election bid diverge from the message of hope and change in Obama’s 2008 campaign, he said.

The Republican convention, which was set to begin in Tampa, Florida, today, has been delayed by a day as inclement weather as Tropical Storm Isaac bears down upon the state.

Most of the business of the convention will be conducted tomorrow instead of today, and once the event gets under way, voters will see that Romney is more capable of leading the nation to economic prosperity, according to Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus.

“We’re still going to prosecute the president on what he promised and what he delivered,” Priebus said on CNN’s “State of the Union” show. “We need someone to fix the economy and Mitt Romney is the one that can do it.”

Voters will also learn about who Romney is as a person, as a husband and father, Priebus said.

While the U.S. unemployment rate was at 8.3 percent in July, Democrats have highlighted Romney’s wealth. Romney, the son of a Michigan governor, has also ascribed to “extreme positions” taken by some members of his party, Obama said in an interview with the Associated Press, published Aug. 25.

Obama was “the first post-Watergate candidate for president who said he was going to push aside the federal spending limits and spend an unlimited amount based on what he could raise,” Romney said of campaign financing during the Fox broadcast. “I would far rather have a setting where we had both agreed to the federal spending limits”...

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