President Obama said at a Seattle campaign event yesterday that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney had drawn the “wrong lessons” from his success in the private sector.
“Now, my opponent in this election, Governor Romney, he’s a patriotic American,” Obama said “He’s raised a wonderful family. He should be proud of the great personal success he’s had as the CEO of a large financial firm.
“But I think he’s drawn the wrong lessons from those experiences. He actually believes that if CEOs and the wealthiest investors like him get rich, that the rest of us automatically do, too,” Obama said as the audience laughed.
He told the crowd of 1,800 at the Paramount Theater, who had dropped at least $1,000 apiece for the president’s speech and a performance by the Dave Matthews Band, that Romney had given a woman in Iowa telling him of her financial troubles “an answer right out of an economics textbook.”
“He said, ‘Our productivity equals our income,’ as if the only reason people can’t pay their bills is because they’re not productive enough,” Obama said. (Here’s the original news story on the Romney comment that Obama is now frequently inserting into speeches.)
“What Governor Romney does not seem to get is that a healthy economy doesn’t just mean maximizing your own profits through massive layoffs or busting unions,” he added.
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