Mitt Romney appeared on Fox & Friends this morning to continue swinging at President Obama for saying that the private sector is “doing fine.” Romney lays out statistic after statistic to point out that Obama just might be a tad out of touch.
GRETCHEN CARLSON: “What did you make of the press tour yesterday with local stations from across the country that the president folks wanted him to do, undoubtedly in response to his private sector gaffe on Friday?”
MITT ROMNEY: “Well, he’s had a number of very revealing comments that show just how far out of touch he is with what’s happening in the country. Yesterday, he said among other things, that he didn’t realize that ObamaCare is having any impact on small business. I’d acquaint him with a survey done by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that asked small businesses how ObamaCare is affecting them, 75 percent, three quarters of them said it was less likely for them to hire people because of ObamaCare. And then, of course, his comment that the private sector is doing fine at a time when instead you’ve seen growth of our economy below 2 percent for the first quarter and you have about 15 percent of Americans out of work or stopped looking for work or underemployed. The president is really out of touch with what’s happening across America.”
President Obama may have turned the election into a referendum on how well he really gets the American economic struggle, with that statement on Friday. He has been doing damage control ever since, but the damage continues to be done by a wildfire burning out of control. That’s because there is one fact lurking behind the gaffe: It reflects what Obama and many other Democrats really think. In a time when governments face bankruptcy and strikes at the hands of government union members, the president consistently tries to grow the only sector he knows anything at all about, which is the government sector that we cannot afford at its present level, never mind growing it. His relationship with the private sector has always been either that of an alien, or that of a hostile community organizer. Obama was able to obscure that four years ago, but his comment on Friday that the private sector which has lost nearly 5 million jobs in the past few years is “doing fine” brought his lack of private sector understanding front and center.
Romney has a massive opening here, which he is obviously taking, to drive home the point Democrats most fear, that the president doesn’t understand the economy and has no new ideas for fixing it. Today, a host of Democrats from Ed Rendell to Deval Patrick to former Obama car czar Steven Rattner to Paul Krugman blasting the president or claiming that he “bungled” his lines. TOTUS could not be reached for comment.
On Thursday the president will attempt a reboot — but he will not offer any new ideas in the process. That will present Romney with yet another opportunity to smash Obama for being both out of touch, and out of helpful ideas.
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