DAYTON, Ohio — President Barack Obama started making his closing argument for a second term Tuesday, beginning a furious two-week effort to beat back a late surge by Mitt Romney and hang on to battleground states where voters in many cases are already casting ballots in large numbers.

At the beginning of what the campaign described as a round-the-clock blitz, and on the day after his final debate, Obama tried to address what polling has shown is a consistent question among voters: What kind of agenda does he have for a second term? He released a 20-page booklet encapsulating previously announced policies and contrasting his positions to those of Romney.

The document contains no new proposals and was derided by a spokesman for Romney as a “glossy panic button.” But along with a new television advertisement that began running in nine battleground states, the president’s aides predicted it would help counter the Romney assault plan for the next two weeks that aims to convince voters that Obama has no plans to fix the ailing economy.

Romney and his campaign spent Tuesday pounding away at points Romney made during the debate Monday night, including accusing the president of apologizing for the United States and cutting military spending excessively. Romney flew from Florida to Nevada, where he mocked Obama’s attacks on him as desperate moves by a losing candidate.

“You know, the truth is that attacks on me are not an agenda,” Romney said to a crowd of about 6,000 people in Henderson, Nev. “His is a status quo candidacy. His is a message of going forward with the same policies of the last four years, and that’s why his campaign is slipping, and that’s why ours is gaining so much steam.”

In the president’s minute-long ad, and in appearances at the start of a frenetic week, Obama stepped up his effort to convince the nation that he had brought it back from the brink of near-economic collapse and that Romney would embrace the policies that caused the problems.

But even as he sought to strike a positive note at the start of a three-day swing that is taking him through Ohio, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, Florida and Virginia, Obama also enthusiastically stepped up his attacks. The Republican candidate, the president said at a rally in Florida, wants to “turn back the clock 50 years for immigrants and gays and women” and is pursuing a foreign policy that is “all over the map.”