Obama and Romney were both coming off a week of intensive national fundraising.

Without Democratic primary opposition, Obama had a huge early advantage.

But Romney, likely to surpass the 1,144 delegates needed for the GOP nomination next Tuesday with a primary win in Texas, is starting to catch up as major conservative donors begin opening their wallets.

Through April, Obama and Democratic groups supporting him have raised nearly $450 million and have more than $150 million in the bank. Romney and Republicans backing him have collected more than $400 million during the same stretch and have about $80 million at their disposal.

Both candidates are shooting for raising around $800 million, which would put their combined campaign spending at roughly $1.6 billion. Add another few hundred million from super PACs and convention spending.

Obama opted out of public financing in 2008 and raised $750 million. His spending swamped GOP rival Sen. John McCain, limited to spend the $84 million he received from taxpayers. Super PACs didn’t exist then.

We know what happened in that race. Romney didn’t want to see it happen to him.

Neither candidate had public appearances Friday. Romney was taking a long weekend California hiatus from campaigning, while Obama planned several ceremonial events on Memorial Day.

Obama dismissed Romney’s basic premise earlier this week when he told reporters in Chicago that a president’s job “is not simply to maximize profits.” The president claims Romney would bring back old Republican policies that didn’t work in the past in solving the nation’s economic problems.

“These are new problems that were created by President Obama,” Romney told Fox News on Thursday. “We need new solutions if we’re going to get this economy going again.”

Romney’s jobs assertion rests heavily on relatively small Bain stakes in companies such as Staples and Sports Authority that later grew large and profitable.

Ads by Obama’s re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee emphasize how some companies that Bain invested in went bankrupt and workers lost their jobs while the firm still made money. Obama has been accused by Republicans — and even some Democrats — for appearing to be attacking private enterprise, something the president denies.

Obama held a fund-raiser in San Jose, Calif., Thursday and later planned to speak at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, where his campaign reminded voters is where Romney declared last year that “corporations are people.” Romney visited a West Philadelphia charter school.

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Earlier polls generally showed the former Massachusetts governor holding a slight lead over Obama on economic issues and Obama slightly ahead overall.

But the tightening follows an aggressive attack on Romney’s business credentials by the Obama campaign, including ads painting him as a job-destroying corporate raider at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he co-founded.

Romney called the attacks “character assassination.” But Obama defended the tactic on Monday as legitimate and suggested Romney’s background was a poor qualification for the White House since being president involves more than “maximizing profits.”

Still, some prominent Democratic supporters have expressed discomfort with the attacks, including former Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford Jr., former Obama economic adviser Steve Rattner and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Booker said he found attack ads from both sides “nauseating.” However, he later said Romney’s business record was fair game.

With U.S. unemployment still hovering above 8 percent and economic uncertainty widespread, both candidates have stepped up their emphasis on jobs and the economy.

Romney was fund raising in New York with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and had no public appearances. Obama was at the White House also with no public appearances scheduled.

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Associated Press News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.

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Follow Tom Raum on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tomraum. For more AP political coverage, look for the 2012 Presidential Race in AP Mobile’s Big Stories section. Also follow https://twitter.com/APCampaign and AP journalists covering the campaign: https://twitter.com/AP/ap-campaign-2012.

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Eight leaders from wealthy democracies opened the door to more government spending to ease Europe’s debt crisis at a weekend meeting at Camp David, Md. It was a backlash to widely unpopular austerity measures pushed principally by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

President Barack Obama welcomed the move, citing “an emerging consensus that more must be done to promote growth and job creation right now.” That’s in line with Obama’s contention that tough austerity measures should await a stronger economy.

But there’s clearly no such consensus in American politics.

Romney fed the austerity debate as he campaigned last week in front of a whirring national-debt clock. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., both declared Sunday that when Congress is asked to raise the nation’s borrowing cap after the election, they’ll insist on spending cuts to offset the increase.

That raised the prospect of another knock-down battle like the one last August that led to the first-ever downgrade of America’s credit rating.

Romney, writing in Sunday’s Chicago Tribune, accused Obama of overseeing looming defense cuts he said could undermine NATO’s mission and it into “an alliance in name only.”

Obama presided Monday over NATO’s Chicago summit and was to later address high school seniors in Joplin, Mo. Romney was attending fundraisers in New York.

But mostly he’s been forced on the defensive.

He’s worked to deflect Team Obama efforts to paint him as a job-destroying corporate raider at Bain Capital in the 1980s. A fresh attack came Friday in a two-minute Democratic National Committee video titled “The Bane of Romney’s Existence.”

He also found himself having to repudiate a conservative independent group’s floating of a $10 million TV ad campaign recalling Obama’s ties to the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It would have raised off-message race and religion issues.

The weak economy itself is the strongest challenge confronting Obama. A stream of weak data is undercutting his contention the economy is slowly recovering and the best chance for a full comeback is to stick with him.

Obama kicked off four days of international summitry Friday by announcing $3 billion in private sector pledges to help feed Africa’s poor. But he may find it hard to demonstrate leadership at gatherings at Camp David and Chicago on two issues that defy easy solution: the European debt crisis and getting reluctant NATO members to pay more for Afghan security forces.

Romney campaigned in New Hampshire.