Obama Uses Fellow Republican Attacks Against Romney
President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign team is using attacks from former GOP Presidential Primary candidates against Mitt Romney in a recent campaign ad.
In what can only be described as a bizarre world of a Presidential election year, an incumbent Democratic President is using a negative attack ad against his Republican challenger on the issue of raising taxes and the economy - issues Republicans historically claim as their own against Democratic rivals.
Instead of directly challenging Mitt Romney's record while Governor of Massachusetts, the President is letting Mitt Romney's fellow Republicans do the talking in the video.
The video features quotes from Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, John McCain, and even Jon Huntsman, as they attack Mitt Romney on his economic and taxation record. Noticeably absent from the video are any quotes from Ron Paul, the one Republican candidate who remained the last standing challenger to Romney in the GOP primary.
In a campaign blog separate from the video, Obama-Biden deputy campaign manager echoed many of the same attacks Americans heard from Romney's Republican rivals during the GOP primary:
"Even as the rest of the country was enjoying a brightening economy,
during Romney's term Massachusetts plummeted to 47th out of 50 states in
job creation; manufacturing jobs declined at twice the national
average; and for the first time since 1995, its unemployment rate was
above the national average.
Long-term debt ballooned by more than $2.6 billion—leaving the people
of Massachusetts with the highest per capita debt of any state in the
nation. State spending increased every single year, and Romney raised
taxes and fees by $750 million per year—leading to a higher state and
local tax burden of $1,200 for every Bay Stater. Over his term, fees at
public colleges skyrocketed by 63 percent, and during his first year,
K-12 schools saw the second-largest percentage cuts, per student, in the
nation.
All that in just four years."
Romney on the other hand, attacks Obama directly in a video staged in front of Solyndra - the failed green energy company that received and lost a half-billion tax dollars during Obama's green energy stimulus plan.
Romney also directly attacks Obama on his economic recovery plan. Romney's name takes authorship for his campaign blog:
"Even before taking office, Barack Obama and his team settled upon an
approach to resuscitate the economy that entailed massive fiscal
stimulus. Proposing to begin the stimulus with more than $775 billion in
new government spending, which the incoming administration trumpeted as
the “biggest, boldest, countercyclical fiscal policy action in American
history,” they put forward highly specific predictions about what their
policy would accomplish: “A package in the range that the
President-Elect has discussed is expected to create between three and
four million jobs by the end of 2010.” Their report even provided a
chart showing that, with the stimulus, the unemployment rate would be
held under 8 percent.
The stimulus was implemented and the money was spent. But the labor market continued to shrink and an additional 2.5 million jobs were lost. Instead of
remaining below 8 percent, the unemployment rate soared past 10 percent
and has remained above 8 percent for 31 consecutive months. As of the
second quarter of 2011, two years after the Great Recession officially
came to an end, GDP still has not recovered to its pre-recession level.
The absence of recovery has transformed the tragic occurrence of high
unemployment into the far more catastrophic phenomenon of long-term
unemployment. At the end of the recession, the average duration of
unemployment was 24.1 weeks. Now more than two years later, that number
has spiked to a shocking 40.4 weeks, the highest number since the
Department of Labor started tracking the statistic in 1948."
