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."
