By Brian MacQuarrie Globe Staff

STRATHAM, N.H. – Mitt Romney kicked off a bus tour through six swing states Friday morning at the farm where his campaign began a year ago, deriding President Obama as “detached and distant” and assailing his speech on the economy Thursday as a long-winded call for “four more very long years” of the same policies.

Speaking before several thousand people gathered by a large barn, Romney argued that his vision, and not the president’s, would better serve the country’s struggling middle class.

“If there has ever been a president who has failed to give the middle class of America a fair shot, it is Barack Obama,” Romney said. “From now until November, our campaign will carry a simple message: America’s greatest days are ahead.”

Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, linked the president to rising poverty, lower wages, and increasing prices in the country.

He used the term “fair shot” repeatedly to jab the president for his insistence that higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans is a matter of fairness to help balance the budget and reduce the national debt.

“Freedom and free enterprise are what create jobs, not government,” Romney said.

Following the kickoff here, Romney traveled by campaign bus to Milford, where he participated in an ice cream social.

The tour, called “Every Town Counts,” is being shadowed by a caravan of Obama supporters that is calling itself the “Middle Class Under the Bus Tour.”

The supporters gathered at a new Obama campaign office in Exeter before Romney’s speech, where speakers linked the Republican to the pursuit of profits over jobs during his career as head of the private-equity firm Bain Capital.

David Lang, president of the Professional Firefighters of New Hampshire, told about 100 Obama supporters that “I don’t think New Hampshire will be buying the fertilizer [Romney will] be using” to rally voters.