The Romney campaign’s Jeep ad is “pernicious,” Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday just outside Cleveland, though he slipped and suggested that it was “President Clinton” who the Republicans were blaming.

“I think it is pernicious,” Biden told a crowd of 1,100 in the gym at Lakewood High School, before continuing on to describe the ad, but with the mistake of referring to President Obama as his Democratic predecessor. “That ad you’ve seen that says President Clinton bankrupted Chrysler so that Italians could buy it to ship jobs overseas to China, Jeep jobs,” 

Clinton might’ve been on Biden’s mind Sunday, since the vice president took the stage minutes after Obama and Clinton wrapped up a massive rally in Concord, N.H. White House press secretary Jay Carney described the relationship between the two presidents as having grown “quite strong” during the campaign.

Other than Biden’s slight slip, he stayed on message in Lakewood, injecting a localized defense of the Obama administration’s action on the auto industry early on in his speech. “I’d like to tell you, Ohio, no matter what those ads say, we did rescue the auto industry,” he said.

Cuyahoga County, which includes Lakewood and Cleveland, went for Obama by nearly a 2-to-1 margin in 2008, and events like Biden’s — which began with a performance by singer Jason Mraz — are aimed at driving up enthusiasm as Election Day nears.

When he campaigns in most battleground states, Biden closes his stump speech by saying that if Obama wins the state, he will win the election. Nowhere is that truer than in Ohio, where Biden told the crowd: “We need you Ohio, we need you. We win Ohio, we win this election.”

– Politico