JACKSONVILLE, FL -- Mitt Romney convened a rare press conference Thursday to explicitly distance himself from a controversial, racially-charged ad campaign reportedly planned by a Republican super PAC.

His campaign subsumed by a political firestorm first sparked by a New York Times report on a proposed campaign attacking President Obama for his ties to the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Romney appeared on camera to disavow the strategy.

"I want to make it very clear that I repudiate that effort. I think it's the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign," Romney told reporters after his rainy event here today. "I hope that our campaigns can respectively be about the future and about issues and about a vision for America."

First Read: Race front and center in 2012 campaign

The press conference -- a rarity for those following the Romney campaign -- reflected the urgency with which Romney and his advisers felt compelled to distance the candidate from the controversial proposal. Romney had initially passed on commenting this morning, saying he hadn't seen the story, before taping a radio interview this morning condemning the proposal.

Mary Altaffer / AP

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, speaks May 17 at the River City Brewing Company in Jacksonville, Fla.

The plan, which was presented by Strategic Perception and GOP ad man Fred Davis to Joe Ricketts, the owner of the Chicago Cubs, earned heavy backlash from the Obama campaign and many Republicans on Thursday. By mid-afternoon, Ricketts had disavowed the plan, and Strategic Perception had taken sole responsibility for the proposal, on which they said no action was taken.

Ricketts: I'm not going to use Jeremiah Wright

Vice President Joe Biden, campaigning this afternoon in Pennsylvania, condemned the proposed ad campaign, saying its proponents "act like it's 1942."

"I think these guys like that so misunderstand the state of the nation," he told reporters at an unscheduled stop at a Washington, PA BBQ restaurant. "They act like it's 1942. I mean, I think the public is so far beyond that."

Biden said that he'd heard reports that the proposed ad had been rejected by Ricketts.

"I mean look there are certain things that are sorta so morally clear and straight and straight-lined about it," he said. "You almost don't even wanna comment."

Republicans anxiously discourage racially-charged super PAC strategy

But for as much as Romney's press conference served ostensibly defensive purposes, the presumptive Republican nominee used the moment to go on the attack, as well.

Romney said he was "disappointed" in what he claimed was the president's campaign of "character assassination," complaining that ads recently released by the Obama campaign attacking Romney's work at the helm of Bain Capital were inaccurate and unfair.

"There's this fiction that some have that somehow you can be successful by stripping assets at an enterprise and walking away with lots of money and killing the enterprise.  There may be some people that know how to do that. I sure don't," Romney said. "Our approach was always to try and make the enterprise more successful. And the purpose of the president's ads are not to describe success and failure but  to somehow suggest that I'm not a good person or not a good guy."

But the controversy of the day largely overshadowed Romney's bread-and-butter campaign speech about the economy. And for the political class, the Wright controversy also sidelined a more favorable story about the Romney campaign's fundraising success last month.

In Jacksonville, Romney argued the election ought to turn on who has the best plan for "jobs and kids," a catchphrase he was first heard using at a fundraiser last month in Palm Beach, where he will return later this evening for another fundraiser.

The Sunshine State has been good to Romney's campaign financially. Pool reports from his fundraisers show he raised more than $2 million apiece at stops yesterday near Tampa Bay and Miami. Romney declined to say whether Florida was a "must win" for his campaign, but closed his press conference by saying it was a state he was "counting on to be successful in."

Carrie Dann reported from Washington, Pa.

Republicans moved quickly on Thursday in hopes of distancing themselves from a strategy being weighed by a GOP-oriented super PAC, which threatened to inject racial politics into the 2012 presidential campaign.

Mitt Romney’s campaign, joined by a slew of other GOP heavyweights, sought to disavow a strategy that was presented to Joe Ricketts -- the owner of the Chicago Cubs -- that would call for using a super PAC to launch aggressive attack ads against President Barack Obama. The plan, first reported by the New York Times, called for explicitly linking Obama to a former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose occasionally angry sermons touched on themes of race.

Mary Altaffer / AP

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks to reporters while boarding a charter flight May 17 in Miami, Fla.

"I repudiate the effort by that PAC to promote an ad strategy of the nature they've described," Romney told the conservative blog Townhall.

An earlier statement by Matt Rhoades, Romney’s campaign manager, said the campaign would repudiate strategies that rely on personal attacks, though Rhoades made no specific reference toward Ricketts. During a gaggle this morning aboard his campaign plane, Romney told reporters that he hadn't seen the story.

Also to Townhall, Romney expressed frustration that no attention is being paid to what he considers a negative campaign by Team Obama.

"It's interesting that we're talking about some Republican PAC that wants to go after the president [on Wright]," he said. "I hope people also are looking at what he's doing, and saying 'why is he running an attack campaign?  Why isn't he talking about his record?'"

First Thoughts: When Willie Horton meets Jeremiah Wright

Romney has only one public campaign appearance today, where he could further address the controversy, but faced immediate blowback from the Obama campaign.

Jim Messina, the manager of the Obama re-election effort, said the report "reflects how far the party has drifted in four short years since John McCain rejected these very tactics," referring to the decision made in the 2008 Republican nominee's high command against attacking Obama along those lines.

"Once again, Gov. Romney has fallen short of the standard that John McCain set, reacting tepidly in a moment that required moral leadership in standing up to the very extreme wing of his own party,” Messina said.

Steve Schmidt, a top aide to McCain’s presidential campaign, said that he was never prouder than when his candidate rejected the tactic. Invoking Wright wasn’t just the wrong thing to do, Schmidt said; it was the wrong strategy.

"Putting aside that this is the totally wrong thing to do for the country, using race as a political wedge releases a poison into the body politic, and it's totally unpredictable how it plays out," he said.

Mark McKinnon, a former aide to President George W. Bush, added of the proposed strategy: "Exhibit A of what is wrong with our politics today."

Romney campaign repudiates -- but punches back, too

The McCain campaign faced pressure to invoke Wright from some of Obama's most vociferous opponents on the right. Reports at the time indicated that, in particular, then-vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was particularly interested in linking Wright to Obama, who had been forced to address his ties to the controversial pastor during his primary fight against Hillary Clinton.

A spokesman for McCain said Thursday in a statement that the senator stands by his decision at that time.

"Senator McCain is very proud of the campaign he ran in 2008," said Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the Arizona senator. "He stands by the decisions he made during that race and would make them again today if he had it to do over."

Beyond the McCain campaign's judgment that making such an attack -- which would necessarily invoke race into the campaign against America's first black president -- it was judged to be bad politics.

"Would this have been a politically expedient thing for John McCain? No! Everybody knew who Jeremiah Wright was, and people who were deeply troubled by it were not Barack Obama voters," Schmidt said. "It would have been an utterly ineffective political attack."

The quick Republican backlash, though, reflects the extent to which the Obama campaign might gain traction from even the trial balloon associated with the rumored attack. It might mobilize voters, especially African-Americans, who Obama needs to help fuel his re-election, and could boost fundraising from angry supporters.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., even expressed a degree of amusement at the reported attack emanating from Ricketts, who most recently made a splash in politics by spending late in a Nebraska Senate primary on behalf of Deb Fischer, who eventually won.

"I hope they're as successful with this campaign as the Cubs are in baseball," Pelosi said on Capitol Hill, referring to the team's abysmal record.

Her counterpart, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, opted against condemning or even acknowledging the line of attack during his press conference, telling NBC News that "this election is going to be about the economy."

More broadly, the firestorm that erupted Thursday served as a testament to the outsize importance of super PACs in the 2012 campaign.

The Romney campaign had hoped to push a message about its relative fundraising prowess in April after releasing its figures to reporters early this morning. A new poll yesterday had also showed the former Massachusetts governor in a tie against Obama in Wisconsin, suggesting a narrowing battle for the White House.

"This is a function of the brokenness of the campaign finance system," Schmidt said. "One person's bad judgment -- Ricketts' -- has the potential to consume the dialog in the presidential campaign."

NBC’s Chuck Todd, Peter Alexander and Garrett Haake contributed to this report.