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A line of people that stretched for five city blocks awaited Mr. Romney as his motorcade pulled into Union Terminal here.

And inside there were so many people that the campaign had to redirect a few hundred of them into a small overflow room, where they crammed in shoulder to shoulder.

Later, thousands in Jacksonville, Fla., filled a courtyard and gave Mr. Romney and his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, a spirited reception.

Mr. Romney has often failed to spark much of a connection with his audiences, and along the campaign trail enthusiasm has sometimes been in short supply.

But inside a soaring Art Deco-style rotunda here, the candidate, joined by John A. Boehner, the speaker of the House, and Senator Rob Portman, delivered a vigorous and sharply focused speech — complete with fresh punch lines — that sent the audience into earsplitting roars.

Echoing a criticism of the president that he has been making more powerfully lately, Mr. Romney denounced Mr. Obama’s first term as one of betrayed promises and failed leadership.

“One of the promises he made was he was going to create more jobs. And today, 23 million people are out of work or stopped looking for work or underemployed,” Mr. Romney said. “Let me tell you, if you have a coach that’s zero and 23 million, you say it’s time to get a new coach. It’s time for America to see a winning season again, and we’re going to bring it to them.”

Mr. Romney also confronted head-on a subject that he had been more reluctant to wade into: chastising Republicans for running up the deficit when they controlled Washington.

The more popular and convenient story line for many Republicans has often been to lay the blame for record deficits at the feet of the Obama administration.

“We’re going to finally have to do something that Republicans have spoken about for a long time, and for a while we didn’t do it,” he said. “When we had the lead we let people down.”

As Mr. Romney roused the crowd here, Mr. Obama sought to drum up momentum for his convention, which begins Tuesday. He started a four-day, four-state campaign trip on Saturday in Iowa, the state where he opened his quest for the presidency five years ago. In front of a crowd of 10,000 outside Des Moines, he said the Republican convention was a reminder of how backward-looking their vision for the country is.

“You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV,” said Mr. Obama, to the applause and amusement of his audience. He offered a summary, “Everything’s bad, it’s Obama’s fault and Governor Romney is going to be the one who knows the secret to creating jobs and growing the economy.”

“There was a lot of talk about hard truths and bold choices, but nobody ever actually bothered to tell you what they were,” Mr. Obama added. “And when Governor Romney had his chance to let you in on his secrets, he did not offer a single new idea — just retreads of the same old policies that have been sticking it to the middle class for years.”

It was Mr. Obama’s seventh visit to the state this year and his 13th as president, reflecting the importance of this swing state’s six electoral votes to his prospects of winning the necessary 270 votes in a close, unpredictable election.

On Monday, Mr. Obama will take a detour from campaigning to tour the storm damage in Louisiana, a solid Republican state, and then visit Virginia, a swing state, on Tuesday before arriving for the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., on Wednesday.

Mr. Ryan also had a separate campaign stop of his own, visiting Ohio State University in the morning for the football team’s season opener. He joined tailgaters and flipped some burgers on a grill, a skill that his mother, Betty, noted he had acquired working at McDonald’s as a young man.

Since Mr. Romney picked Mr. Ryan as his running mate last month, the former Massachusetts governor has used his younger and spryer No. 2 to add some energy to campaign rallies. But the speech in Cincinnati nevertheless lit a fire in the audience while Mr. Ryan was in another part of the state.

The setting for Mr. Romney’s speech had been the backdrop for another major political event. On Oct. 7, 2002, George W. Bush delivered a televised address from Union Terminal to make his case for the Iraq war.

Mr. Romney’s speech hit some of the same notes that Mr. Romney made in Tampa, Fla., where he accepted his party’s nomination on Thursday night. He accused the president of putting teachers’ unions, not students, first. He said the president would raise taxes on successful small business owners. And he pledged to repeal the president’s health care overhaul, which he called a “big cloud” raining over small businesses.

“America’s going to come roaring back,” Mr. Romney said as he concluded. “We’re going to get America strong again, for you, for your children, for the future.”

The language in the speech, complete with sports team metaphors and the “roaring back” line recalled the message delivered by a Romney campaign supporter in a Super Bowl car commercial that stirred considerable controversy when it aired: That supporter was Clint Eastwood.

Jeremy W. Peters reported from Cincinnati, and Jackie Calmes from Urbandale, Iowa. Trip Gabriel contributed reporting from Columbus, Ohio.

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