MELBOURNE, Fla. — President Obama, picking up where former President Bill Clinton left off, said Sunday that the budget proposals offered by Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan do not add up.
The president was quick to jump on appearances by his Republican rivals on the Sunday morning talk shows, in which they were asked separately what loopholes they would close to pay for their proposed tax cuts. Neither of the men answered the question.
The relationship between Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton started off rocky — Mr. Obama, after all, ran against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in 2008. But after Mr. Clinton’s ringing endorsement of Mr. Obama in a well-received Democratic convention speech on Wednesday, the president mentioned his Democratic predecessor at every stop on a bus tour of Florida over the weekend.
“President Clinton told us the single thing missing from my opponents’ proposal was arithmetic,” Mr. Obama told a rally here, to a burst of applause.
“When my opponents were asked about it today,” Mr. Obama said, “it was like 2 plus 1 equals 5.”
On NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Mr. Romney did not answer several questions from the host, David Gregory, on which tax deductions he would seek to eliminate, saying only that he would target “some of the loopholes and deductions at the high end” while lowering the “burden on middle-income people.”
On the ABC News program “This Week,” Mr. Ryan said that “the best way to do this is to show the framework, show the outlines of these plans, and then to work with Congress.”
Mr. Clinton, at the Democratic National Convention, said the Romney-Ryan plan did not add up. Since then, Mr. Obama has adopted that line on the stump, and he has reiterated it in almost all of his public remarks.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 9, 2012
An earlier version of this post said incorrectly that former President Bill Clinton addressed the Democratic convention on Thursday. His speech was Wednesday.
