New Obama ad continues assault on Romney's Massachusetts record
Updated: 1:06 p.m. ET
(CBS News) Continuing the latest line of attack against presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, President Obama's campaign on Monday released a new ad blasting the former Massachusetts governor for his job creation record, calling it "one of the worst" in the country.
The minute-long ad, entitled "We've Heard it All Before," highlights Romney's claims of economic leadership before touting a series of statistics aimed at casting doubt on that record.
"When Mitt Romney was governor, Massachusetts lost 40,000 manufacturing jobs, a rate twice the national average, and fell to 47th in job creation, 4th from the bottom," the ad's narrator says. "Instead of hiring workers from his own state, Romney outsourced call center jobs to India, he cut taxes for millionaires like himself while raising them on the middle class, and left the state $2.6 billion deeper in debt."
The video intersperses footage of Romney vowing that "I know how jobs are created," with an image of a 2007 Boston Globe op-ed blasting his record "one of the worst in the country."
"When Mitt Romney talks about what he'd do as president, remember, we've heard it all before," the narrator intones. "Romney economics: It didn't work then and it won't work now."
The spot, which will run in the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, is part of the Obama campaign's sustained effort to examine Romney's record on economic leadership in Massachusetts as well as in the private sector. According to top Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod, the buy is worth about $10 million.
In an appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation" Sunday, Axelrod hammered Romney's claims on job creation.
"No one's arguing whether Mitt Romney is qualified to be president," Axelrod said. "What we're arguing is whether he's qualified to call himself a job creator. That's not what he did in his business. That's not the purpose of his business, and it's certainly not what he did in Massachusetts where they had one of the worst economic records in the country."
Responding to the new Obama ad Monday, Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul accused the president of trying to shift public attention away from Friday's slower-than-expected jobs report and on to his rival.
"Having abandoned 'Hope and Change,' the Obama campaign only 'Hopes To Change The Subject' from an abysmal jobs report," Saul said in an e-mailed statement. "We're happy to compare the 4.7 percent unemployment rate Mitt Romney achieved in Massachusetts to President Obama's weak record any day. President Obama's policies have failed to get Americans back to work - it's time for a president who has worked in the real world economy and understands how to get this economy moving again."
Popular in Politics
- Obama forgets to salute while boarding Marine One Play Video
- The Ted Cruz conundrum
- Petraeus biographer regrets affair
- As summer approaches, sequestration threatens holiday fun
- Senators lack votes on immigration despite progress
- IRS' Lerner was asked to resign, refused: GOP Sen. 201 Comments
- Senator: Oklahoma "hit hard, but we're not knocked out"
- GOP Rep.: Obama elected because of Reagan's immigration reforms
Congress's agenda has a logical problem of economic principle. A deep cut during an economy, which has just barely recovered, will lead directly to severe consequences based on Keynesian economic theory and demand-supply theory. The majority of consumers will have less money to spend, so demand will decrease; consequently supply will decrease, leading to more unemployment and less profits to corporations. Finally, the national real disposal income will decrease proportionally with less consumer spending.
On the other hand, Obama's tax increase agenda makes sense from an academic point of view but other sensitive issues must be considered. The majority of senators and congressman have income higher than $250,000 and a common greedy sense. Therefore it's not surprising to see much bipartisan objection from the legislature. Therefore, a tax increase on income from $250,000 to one million dollars has to be only 1% or 2% instead of 39.6%. The only practical point of view is to increase the rate of 39.6 or higher on 236,883 millionaires with income over $1 million and at least of 30% of any income over $1 million.
Obama's economic policy is firm : Opposing the idea of Bush-era tax cuts for wealthier Americans at the end of 2012, no further spending cuts without steps to increase tax revenues, which Republicans oppose. Nevertheless, "It's pretty obvious that the economy needs the certainty of the extension of the current tax rates for at least a year," said Mitch McConnell. As a matter of fact, Obama has consistently insisted that taxes on households making over $250,000 a year should be allowed to rise to the pre-Bush level of 39.6 percent, from 35 percent at the moment. Where is Senator Mitch McConnell's point to justify a delay of one more year for economic need?
Mr. Mitt Romney and many Republican politicians argue that "Millionaires are job creators". Is it true that 'Increasing the income tax rate on millionaires would hurt the economy because they are job creators' ? Perhaps the answer is: Who froze billions of dollars in banks from 2008 to now? Remember, during that period of that time have had the low current top tax rate-35%- and why is the rate of unemployment still 8.2% today?
As a matter of fact, millionaires have not created jobs even with low tax rates during 12 years - consumers are catalysts to create jobs. What's hurting consumers most is that Obama cut spending in 2011 to the bone - spending has been very low compared with the last decade .
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/05/12066975-giving-new-meaning-to-reckless-spending
ammo17 asked, "20 years from now they will be writing and talking about this administration.what do you think it will say?"
--------
1. They will wonder how Obama was so fortunate to have a gang of idiots from the GOP, each with a terrible record of achievement (with possible exception of Ron Paul), queue up to face him in 2012.
2. They also will wonder how the bozo-led GOP camp could miss the dead elephant in the room-- that in 2008, the GOP delivered a crash and recession, just as it had in 1929. Before the crash, the lackluster GOP economy resisted eight years of comic Bush attempts to jump-start a "free market economy" on Wall Street-- and chartered, instead, a den of thieves the like of which this nation has not seen since 1929.
3. They will wonder how the GOP, after delivering the worst economic disaster in 80 years, could pride itself as the party of business. That claim, of course, means knowing how to create jobs, not destroy them.
The GOP performance resume is dismal. On leaving office, the Bush economy was losing between 700-800,000 jobs monthly. Romney, the Bush proxy in this election, worked for years as the Dr. Death of marginal corporations, firing workers, not hiring them, and selling off assets, not creating them.
4. They will not wonder that the rich want to pay less in taxes than anybody else, but they will wonder about this-- the GOP is glad to force austerity on the rest of us, and have us pay the share of taxes the rich prefer not to pay.
Thanks for a good article on the prevailing ad campaign, as it develops. Especially commendable is the editorial focus on claims, counterclaims and ideas. Unless we learn to focus on what the candidates are saying, not how they look and speak, Americans will miss a critical part of maintaining their democracy. This year, with billions behind dueling political ad campaigns, that critical focus is more important than ever.
Distracting a critical focus on ideas is only way to counter an ad about the truth, so count on a bumper crop of temptations to distraction. To distract a jury during arguments by opposing counsel, legendary attorney Clarence Darrow was fond of pulling out a long cigar and puffing away. To distract the jury even further, Darrow concealed a wire in his cigar, so the ash-- no matter how long it grew-- never fell. Eventually, most of the jury stopped listening and focused on the cigar.
Some ad specialists consider the political advertisement a high-tech exercise in simply grabbing audience attention. The well-crafted ad is a cognitive machine, in which every part is unbolted, reworked to perfection, and bolted back on to test performance. The typical ad is examined with focus groups for not only primary effects, but any unexpected, weird or collateral effects, good or bad, and reworked once again.
Because of the massive competitive effort this election, we probably will see an exceptional ad or two-- truly effective ads get heavy use and become familiar. Unfortunately, such effective ads are not necessarily about facts or the truth (facts in context), because people do not easily resist a well-crafted pitch, even if UNtrue.
Which means entertainment may have become more important than any other factor in a political ad. Billions more will be spent in this campaign because campaign media staff understand they can reach more voters by entertaining them. Witness Reagan's "Morning in America" political campaign ads, which Garry Trudeau lampooned for all its simple-minded whitewash (in every sense), but which were very effective at associating a good feeling with a candidate's name and image.
Again, with enough entertainment value, even lies are difficult to resist. Which is worrisome, because billionaires can pay ten times as many scriptwriters to write their ads and tell... entertaining stories. Faux News is a prime example of the new genre-- a news network that is not about news. As almost everyone has realized by now, Faux's actual function is to put the Archie Bunkers of America to sleep-- all so they will stay locked on the same channel, and miss different points of view.
He lies all the time.
His recorded achievements at Bain Capital are fiction. He claims to have created jobs. It all about creating jobs. He claims over 100,000 were created.
Nobody at Bain Capital can understand why this fool is saying this since nobody knows how many jobs were created while the CEO was Mittens or overall.
What is a pathological liar boys and girls? Someone he can not tell the truth. Romney is a pathetic pathological liar kids. Tell your parents a couple hundred times so it will sink in.
But Romney is no fool, only an enthusiastic mercenary. A primary weakness of the mercenary is he does not own the mission-- others own him. Romney stumbles and falls repeatedly over the presidential threshold on campaign merits, but the huge funding driving his campaign ignores all that.
All they want is find the button that delivers your vote.
Senior al-Qaeda leader Abu Yahya al-Libi was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan on Monday, a US official has told the BBC.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney called Russia "without question our number one geopolitical foe" Monday on CNN.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/26/mitt-romn...
"This is without question our number one geopolitical foe; they fight for every cause for the world's worst actors. The idea that he has more flexibility in mind for Russia is very, very troubling indeed," said Romney.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said on MSNBC that he was not impressed when former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said Russia was the country's top geostrategic threat. "C'mon, Mitt, think," he said. "That isn't the case." Powell added that some of Romney's foreign policy advisers are " quite far to the right" and their recommendations should "get a second thought." http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/colin-powell-questions-mitt-romneys-foreign-policy-comes-out-in-support-of-gay-marriage/2012/05/23/gJQApcbLlU_blog.html
On taking his mission, Powell was handed what Cheney had alleged about WMDs, but threw much of it out, recrafting the argument. Unfortunately for Powell, the prime "evidence" Bush and Cheney offered him for Iraqi complicity in 911 was the waterboarded confessions of a single man.
Asked later why he had lied to his interrogators, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi calmly insisted he did so to stop the torture. He told Egyptian waterboarders what they wanted him to say.
Romney and his aides have struggled to respond consistently to intensifying criticism about his tenure at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he helped found, and how it would be reflected in his presidency......
RECOMMENDED: Mitt Romney's five biggest liabilities as GOP nominee
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/DC-Decoder/2012/0423/Mitt-Romney-s-five-biggest-liabilities-as-GOP-nominee/What-does-he-really-believe
Romney created 4,800 jobs as governor of Massachusetts. Obama created over 4 million jobs nationally and 21,400 jobs in Massachusetts alone which is 4 times more jobs than Romney created as governor.
Here is the propaganda slogan: "Obama requests an increase in the income tax rate for millionaire because he is a Marxist leader."
Question: Are the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Australia Marxist or communist countries?
Fact:
Top income tax rate in 2012:
United Kingdom: (over 150,000) 50%, France: 41%, Germany: 45%
Question: What is Romney's 2011 Income?
Mr. Romney may save about $5 million on his income taxes per year if there is no tax reform and no increase in the top tax rate.
Is it true that 'Increasing the income tax rate on millionaires would hurt the economy because they are job creators'?
Question for Mr. Romney: Who did freeze billions of dollars in banks from 2008 to now during which they have had the low current top tax rate and why is the rate of unemployment still 8.2% today?
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/05/1...