President Obama’s senior campaign adviser this morning on CNN’s State of the Union accused Mitt Romney of running a campaign “predicated on the negative.”
“I’m not Barack Obama, therefore elect me,” David Axelrod said of the campaign messaging. “And I’m a businessman, so I know how to fix the economy. Well, if that’s the experience he’s running on, then, of course, that experience is going to be scrutinized.”
“Harry Truman had a plaque on his desk saying the buck stops here. If Mitt Romney became president he would have a placard on his desk saying the buck stops there,” Axelrod said of the recent talking point over when Romney left Bain Capital.
Axelrod said that even Romney has been using legal tax shelters overseas, Obama wouldn’t do that because “he looks at this through a different lens.”
“But we don’t even know the scope of it,” Axelrod said. “…And I can only conclude that they think with all these Republicans asking him to release these returns, that whatever is in those returns would be more damaging to his campaign than simply not releasing them.”
Addressing the Bain charges, Romney adviser Ed Gillespie said that Romney took a leave of absence from the company to “go save the Olympics.”
“You know, there may have been thought at the time that he could be part time. It was not part time. The Olympics was in a shambles. There was corruption. There was — the International Olympic Committee was going to pull the Olympics from the United States of America which would have been a huge embarrassment. Because of Mitt Romney’s leadership skills he was called on to do it,” Gillespie said.
“He took a leave of absence and, in fact, he ended up not going back at all and retired retroactively to February of 1999 as a result.”
“He left a life he loved to go to Salt Lake City to save the Olympics for a country he loves more, and somehow Chicago, in classic Chicago-style politics, the Obama campaign is trying to make this something sinister,” Gillespie continued. “It’s not. It’s patriotic and it’s leadership.”
Of the tax returns, Gillespie said Romney would release this year’s and last year’s.
“And that’s the standard that Senator McCain as Republican nominee in the last election said was the relevant standard. It’s the standard that Senator John Kerry as the Democratic nominee said was the standard,” he said. “And we are going to release them. And that’s above and beyond what the law requires, by the way.”
– voters.
Sounds good to me. Anybody but Obama.
Exactly my reaction. I’ll vote for Pee Wee Herman if he’s running against Obama. At least Pee Wee knows what he’s doing.
Agree, ’tis true, selah.
Isn’t that what Obama did in 2008? McCain = Bush, I’m not Bush
That’s pretty much exactly what he did. Well, that, and a bunch of general, meaningless nonsense about “hope and change,” and a bunch of lies about things he would or wouldn’t do, as well as a lot of throwing folks under the bus when they became inconvenient.
Axelrod is right that Romney is running on the fact that he isn’t obama. The problem with that is there are 50,000 full-time propagandists ready to rebut anything slightly negative about obama. And they control the communication channels to 80% of the population.
What is Romney’s message? we should all be able to recite five major themes/plans like they were imprinted in our brains. All I can recite is stuff I knew 10 years before Romney got the nomination, and 4 of the 5 I’m not so sure Romney believes in.
Romney does some stuff better than McCain, but McCain’s military career was pretty much impossible to denigrate. Everything about Romney is easy to denigrate. But we all knew that, didn’t we? Seems to me we were well warned by some real smart people. You could say the same thing about Reagan, of course, but RR wasn’t running against an army of propagandists as organized and ruthless as they are now that they have crawled our from under the baseboards and openly declared war on American values….and Reagan had a message, didn’t he? And he wasn’t ashamed to say it.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of nonsense Romney and his people have invited by keeping such a low profile. They don’t provide any meat for a policy attack, so it’s a personal attack. And,given the press’ bias, it’s working to some extent. Not that the Dems weren’t going to do all the character assassination they can, but, if all Romney’s got to offer is “not Obama”, then it really is all about personalities, isn’t it?
If Romney insists on sounding a quiet and uncertain trumpet, nobody will follow; they don’t know where he’s going.
Well, that’s not Romney’s message, but even if it were, it would work for me.
So Axelrod has joined the “Bainers”?
I’ll predict a negative for you: Obama will not get enough votes to be re-elected.