Axelrod: Romney does not have "big momentum"

President Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod, denied on "CBS This Morning" that Mr. Obama is sliding in the polls and that Mitt Romney is gaining momentum.

"I don't think there's a slide in the polls; I think there was a bump after the debate," Axelrod said Thursday. "I don't think there's big momentum" for Romney, he said, allowing that the Republican challenger "collected a couple of points."

A new Quinnipiac/CBS News/NY Times pollshows Mr. Obama's lead tightening in Wisconsin and Romney with a slight advantage in Colorado.

On the morning of the first and only vice presidential debate, Axelrod said Vice President Joe Biden's challenge "is going to be to pin Congressman Ryan down."

"The Romney campaign is running away from some of their positions like unwanted step children, but we're going to hold them to them," he said.

Axelrod said Biden will make the distinction between the two campaign's visions.

"The president has vision that has squarely in it the interest of the middle class and the notion that you build the economy through the middle class," he said. "The other side has the same trickle-down theory that Paul Ryan voted for the last decade: big tax breaks for the wealthy, deregulate and let Wall Street write their own rules and hope for the best."

As for the amount of pressure Biden is going to put on Ryan, Axelrod quoted Harry Truman: "I don't give them hell, I just tell them like it is and they feel like they're in hell."

"Maybe Congressman Ryan's feeling the pressure of his own positions," he added.

On the ongoing investigation into the administration's handling of the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, Axelrod defended U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's initial comments that the attacks were "spontaneous." He said accusations that she was pressured to make the remarks is "absolute nonsense," adding that she repeated what she was told by the intelligence community.