After a Disappointing Jobs Report, Romney Attacks Obama

Michael Appleton for The New York TimesMitt Romney questioned President Obama’s jobs policies at a campaign event on Friday in Orange City, Iowa.

SIOUX CITY, Iowa – Seizing on a disappointing jobs report, Mitt Romney questioned on Friday whether President Obama “knows what he’s doing” when it came to fixing the economy.

“There’s almost nothing the president has done in the past three and a half, four years that gives the American people confidence that he knows what he’s doing when it comes to jobs and the economy,” Mr. Romney told reporters as he stopped here for a campaign rally.

In Mr. Romney’s first remarks since the Democratic National Convention wrapped up on Thursday night, the Republican nominee said Mr. Obama had offered little more than empty promises. The employment report released on Friday morning showed that the economy added 96,000 jobs in August, down from a revised figure of 141,000 in July and well below the 125,000 level economists had been expecting.

“What is he going to do to get this economy going?” Mr. Romney said. “And all he said last night was the same as what he said four years ago — which, by the way, he made a lot of promises four years ago. Can you think of any of those promises that was met? I mean, he was going to create jobs. We haven’t. Lower unemployment? He hasn’t. Rising take-home pay? It’s gone down.”

His appearance in Iowa came as the Romney campaign was ramping up activity on another front. It announced on Friday a major advertising campaign in eight swing states. The commercials – 15 in all – are specifically tailored to resonate with voters in each of those states.

In Florida, for example, people will see commercials about falling real estate values and high foreclosure rates. In Colorado, where the military and defense contractors are large employers, people will hear how the president’s budget cuts could cost 20,000 military jobs there.

And here in Iowa, they will hear how “excessive government regulations are crushing small businesses and family farms.”

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Obama Defends Attacks on Romney's Work at Bain

5:11 p.m. | Updated CHICAGO — President Obama said that he considered attacks on Mitt Romney’s experience at Bain Capital to be fair game, declaring that the former chief executive’s claims to being a strong business leader made his background at the private equity firm worthy of a serious debate.

“This is not a distraction,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference at the end of the NATO summit in Chicago on Monday, referring to Mr. Romney’s Bain record. “This is what this campaign is going to be about.”

The president has come under criticism from some of his Democratic allies for the Bain attacks. On Sunday, Cory A. Booker, the mayor of Newark, and a top supporter of Mr. Obama, called the president’s attacks on Bain a “nauseating” part of negative campaigning on both sides.

Mr. Booker said the attacks on Bain Capital in campaign advertisements were unfair, though he later issued an about-face on Twitter and in a video, during which he said that Mr. Romney’s record at Bain was actually fair game.

Mr. Obama refused to concede that the attacks were unfair or unjustified, saying that Mr. Romney’s limited experience buying and selling companies for profit leaves him with little understanding of the job that a president needs to do.

“If your main argument for how to grow the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,’ then you are missing what this job is about,” Mr. Obama said, stressing the words “this job” in his answer.

“It doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity,” Mr. Obama added. “But that’s not what my job is as president. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some.”

Mr. Obama said he views private equity firms like Bain Capital as a “healthy part of the free market” designed to “maximize profits.” He said there are “folks who do good work” in that line of work.

But he made clear that he views those who work in private equity — and Mr. Romney in particular — as limited by a view of the economy that prioritizes profits above all else. The president said that view was too limited at a time of economic struggles in the country.

“Their priority is to maximize profits, and that’s not always going to be good for businesses or communities or workers,” he said.

Referencing the videos his campaign has released in the past two weeks that featured workers laid off by Bain companies, Mr. Obama said: “I’ve got to think about those workers in that video just as much as I’m thinking about folks who have been much more successful.”

“The reason why this is relevant,” Mr. Obama said, “is Romney’s main calling card for why he should be elected is his business experience.”

Mr. Obama’s advisers insist that their full-throated assault on Bain Capital, now in its second full week, is intended as a critique of Mr. Romney’s claims to be a jobs creator. But much of the commentary on Mr. Obama’s behalf describes Mr. Romney in highly personal and unflattering ways.

That approach has begun to have consequences. On Sunday, Mr. Booker said both campaigns should stop the “crap” they have been offering the public.

“This, to me, I’m very uncomfortable with,” Mr. Booker said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program.

A few hours later, Mr. Booker released a three-minute video backing off his criticism and trying to draw a distinction between personal attacks and legitimate criticisms of Mr. Romney’s time at Bain. In the video, he said it is “reasonable” for Mr. Obama’s campaign to examine his rival’s business record.

Mr. Booker’s first instinct may have been influenced by his ties with Wall Street executives, many of whom are his supporters. Other Democrats who have criticized the Bain attacks — like Steven Rattner, Mr. Obama’s former auto czar — are also close to the private equity world.

But the episode involving Mr. Booker suggests that Mr. Obama is walking a fine line as he tries to make Bain Capital a central issue in the presidential campaign. Both candidates are eager to attract independent voters who may be turned off by attacks they think cross a line of decency. And Mr. Romney has jumped at the chance to argue that the president has done just that.

Last week, Mr. Romney said the Bain attacks from Mr. Obama were intended to suggest that “I’m not a good person, or a good guy.”

The Republican party sought to stoke the issue further on Monday, using video of Mr. Booker’s “Meet the Press” comments to raise money with an e-mail that says, “I Stand With Cory.” The Republican National Committee also launched an “I Stand With Cory” petition drive and began using the #StandWithCory hashtag on Twitter.

And Mr. Romney’s campaign produced a video alleging that Mr. Obama’s supporters have “had enough of President Obama’s attacks on free enterprise.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign has dismissed that criticism, saying its Web site — RomneyEconomics.com — is an effort to describe how the values Mr. Romney pursued at Bain would color his actions as president.

“This is not about private equity or how Romney ran his company,” Stephanie Cutter, a deputy campaign manager for Mr. Obama, told reporters recently. “It’s about whether his business experience there qualifies him to be president.”

But the campaign advertisements and conference calls are frequently platforms to question Mr. Romney’s personal qualities.

A video released Monday by Mr. Obama’s campaign highlights an office supply company whose workers were fired when it was bought by a Bain company. In the ad, the workers deride Mr. Romney’s personal ethics.

One says that Mr. Romney “did not care about us as workers.” Another says that Mr. Romney “takes from the poor and the middle class and gives to the rich. He’s just the opposite of Robin Hood.”

A third says flatly: “You can tell by the way he acts, the way he talks. He doesn’t care anything about the middle-class or the lower-class people.”

In another ad, set at a Kansas City, Mo., steel plant, Joe Soptic, a former worker there, says that as president, Mr. Romney “would be so out of touch with the average person in this country.”

“How could you care? How could you care for the average, working person if you feel that way?” Mr. Soptic says.

He went even further in a conference call with reporters, saying that Mr. Romney “is only worried about one group of people, and that’s people like him, people at the top.”

The personal criticisms of Mr. Romney also come directly from Mr. Obama’s campaign officials. In the conference call with Mr. Soptic, Ms. Cutter said the issue was Mr. Romney’s personal values.

“Romney didn’t care about rewarding hard work or responsibilities,” she said. “It’s absolutely on the table as an indication of Romney’s values.”

That message is being echoed in “super PAC” advertisements on the campaign’s behalf. An ad by Priorities USA Action concludes with a worker saying that Mr. Romney “promised us the same things he’s promising the United States. He’ll give you the same thing he gave us. Nothing. He’ll take it all.”

To be sure, Mr. Romney’s campaign has been aggressive in describing Mr. Obama in personal ways. Mr. Romney repeatedly says that the president “doesn’t get it,” painting Mr. Obama as a kind of slow-learning neophyte in the Oval Office. His campaign often describes the president as a liar, saying he personally broke promises he made to the American people.

And the Republican super PACs have targeted Mr. Obama personally. The Times reported last week on a plan by one of them to link Mr. Obama to his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr..

The question may be whether either campaign is making progress with voters by making the race more about the candidates and less about the policies they pursue.

Mr. Booker said on “Meet the Press” that the trash talk was crowding out more serious conversations about the economy and other issues. And in his video clarification, he continued to urge the candidates to stay away from the personal attacks.

“My concern is we are about to go into a significant political campaign that will affect the destiny of our nation,” he said. “I am, indeed, upset. I am, indeed, frustrated. But I believe the American public, working together, we can begin to more and more denounce this type of campaigning.”

“Ultimately,” he added, “my hope is that this election will not therefore be about the small things, will not be about divisiveness, will not be about denigrating, will not be about painting with a broad brush.”

Bain Capital issued a statement Monday in response to the new video from Mr. Obama’s campaign. Charlyn Lusk, a spokeswoman for the firm, said it has always tried to grow businesses.

“Our control of Ampad ended in 1996, fully four years before it encountered financial difficulties due to overwhelming pressure from ‘big box’ retailers, declines in paper demand, and intense foreign price pressures,” she said. “During Bain Capital’s ownership, revenues grew in 80 percent of the more than 350 companies in which we have invested.”

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 21, 2012

An earlier version of this post referred incorrectly to Cory A. Booker. He is the mayor of Newark, N.J., not the mayor of New Jersey. It also misspelled the name of President Obama's former auto czar. He is Steven Rattner, not Stephen.

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Obama Attacks Romney From the Left - Campaign Memo

Mitt Romney may be inclined to start moving to the political center now that he’s practically got the Republican nomination won and done, but the Obama campaign would much rather keep him right where he’s been for the past few months: in the conservative territory he staked out while battling for Republican primary voters.

After months of depicting Mr. Romney as the ultimate squishy, double-talking, no-core soul, Team Obama is shifting gears. Senior administration officials, along with Democratic and campaign officials, all say their strategy now will be to tell the world that Mr. Romney has a core after all — and it’s deep red.

Mr. Romney’s overheard remarks at a fund-raiser in Florida on Sunday night that, if elected, he planned to slash government programs (though he has not spelled that out for the voters) gave Obama backers the perfect opening, and they jumped on it. “Mitt Romney Tells Rich Voters His Secret Plan to Cut Housing Assistance,” said a headline from ThinkProgress, a blog put out by the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Democratic officials followed that up with a call to reporters on Thursday charging that Mr. Romney’s proposal would “cut critical funds for homeless veterans.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama’s advisers saw another chance, and they were all over that, too. Hours after Mr. Romney accepted the endorsement of Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, the Democratic National Committee was out with an ad “Mitt Romney and Tom Corbett: Too Extreme for Women.” The traditional spooky music accompanies video of Mr. Corbett defending his advocacy of a proposal that could make women undergo ultrasounds before receiving abortions, and saying women could “close their eyes” if they didn’t want to see what was on the screen.

“Did Mitt Romney close his eyes to accept this endorsement?” the D.N.C. said in an e-mail it helpfully sent to reporters trumpeting the advertisement. “Probably not, since Mitt Romney’s positions mirror those of the extreme elements of his party,” the e-mail continued, going on to list a host of conservative Romney positions that Democrats hope will alienate women.

For Mr. Obama, the decision to start going after Mr. Romney from the left is as much a logical evolution as is any attempt by Mr. Romney to move to the center, in particular Mr. Romney’s effort now to try to woo Hispanic and female voters who may have been alienated by some of the talk coming out of the Republican primary.

As the general election heats up, a central battlefield promises to be the fights for suburban women in crucial swing states like Florida, Ohio and Colorado, and both camps are now trying to prove their bona fides with that population. When added to recent data that shows an increase in Hispanic voters in key states, the Obama campaign sees an opening to paint Mr. Romney as out of touch among both women and Hispanics.

As far as the Romney campaign is concerned, officials say that efforts to paint their candidate as an extremist will not fly. “They are grasping at straws,” said Andrea Saul, Mr. Romney’s spokeswoman. “The Obama campaign first said President Obama was going to run on his record and the election would be a referendum on his handling of the economy. When it was clear that wouldn’t work, his team said they were going to adopt a ‘Kill Mitt’ strategy. Then came the plan to run against President Bush again, and then, against Congress. Next they tried to claim Governor Romney had no core.”

Ms. Saul said that while “each new day brings a different made-up attack from the Obama campaign, what doesn’t change is the fact that President Obama has failed and so is going to try to tear down Mitt Romney instead of talking about his record.”

Still, voters should ready themselves for reminders from the Obama campaign that Mr. Romney proposed eliminating Title X, the only federal program devoted to family planning, that he suggested letting the foreclosure process “run its course and hit the bottom,” and that he staked out a position on immigration that was to the right of Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. The campaign will make certain it is well known that Mr. Romney just agreed to be the commencement speaker at the conservative Liberty University; in fact, within minutes of Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr.’s announcement on Thursday, Democratic operatives were e-mailing the news around.

“Mitt Romney has spent the last two years taking the most extreme positions of his party, whether it’s on economic policy or social policy,” said Stephanie Cutter, the deputy campaign manager of Mr. Obama’s re-election team. “He can try to flip-flop to the center, but who is going to believe him?”

David Plouffe, a senior White House adviser, said in a telephone interview, “Whether it’s tax policy, whether it’s his approach to abortion, gay rights, immigration, he’s the most conservative nominee that they’ve had going back to Goldwater.” He added that “one of the key issues in the campaign is to make sure people know that.”

But what about David Axelrod’s Twitter feed, which has, nonstop for the past few months, seemed fixated on a depiction of Mr. Romney as the ultimate feather in the wind? (“Yesterday, Mitt predicted victory. Today, he says 3d would be fine. He can’t even stick to the same position on THAT!” Mr. Axelrod, an Obama adviser, said on Twitter on the morning of the Iowa caucuses in January.)

Obama strategists insist they’re not flip-flopping on the flip-flopper label, which they believe can serve them well at any given moment. But there appears to be a clear realization that for general election purposes, they may do better with an emphasis on Mr. Romney’s conservative stances.

The reason goes back to the very thing that has, all along, made Mr. Romney the candidate whom the Obama campaign has always viewed as the most formidable out of the Republican herd. Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, the architect of a health care plan which is remarkably similar to Mr. Obama’s signature domestic policy item, is still viewed among many  independents as something of a moderate, and as such, he is more dangerous to Mr. Obama in a general election than the rest of the Republican field.

That viewpoint made Mr. Romney vulnerable during the Republican primaries and at least partly explains his fierce embrace of conservation positions to offset Republican doubts. But it may make him tougher to beat in November. Mr. Romney himself seemed to acknowledge his need to move to the center during his overheard remarks on Sunday, when he told supporters that “we have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party,” and warned that big Latino support for Mr. Obama “spells doom for us.” While he did not explicitly endorse a Republican proposal to chart a path to legality for the offspring of illegal residents, he didn’t dismiss the idea either.

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Column: Palin attacks on Obama lack a grasp of facts

In a not-so-swift swift-boat attack on Barack Obama, Sarah Palin tried to link the Secret Service sex scandal to the president's ability to manage this nation's affairs. But she succeeds only in demonstrating how fuzzy her knowledge is of the government she came close to being a heartbeat away from running.

By Mark Wilson, Getty Images

Palin: Cites Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7.

By Mark Wilson, Getty Images

Palin: Cites Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7.

DeWayne Wickham USATODAY columnist

Palin told Fox News' Greta Van Susteren that the Secret Service agents' inappropriate contact with Colombian prostitutes was "a symptom of a government run amok" and Obama's "poor management skills." Then Palin offered up this bit of nonsense as proof of her contention: "The No. 1 thing that he is responsible for is … violating Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution in not having a budget."

What she's talking about is the section of the Constitution that spells out the responsibility of Congress, not the president, to appropriate money spent by all branches of the federal government. That clause of the Constitution does not mandate creation of a federal budget. It doesn't even use the word "budget."

Failure of Congress

The president is required by the 1921 Budget and Accounting Act to submit a budget to Congress — and that's exactly what Obama has done every year since taking office. That Congress hasn't passed any of his budgets is a failing of both Republican and Democratic legislators on Capitol Hill, not the man who occupies the Oval Office.

Blaming Obama for Congress' failure to pass a budget might be good politics for the former Alaska governor, but it's bad civics.

It has been "over 1,000 days with no budget, no blueprint to run our federal government," Palin told Van Susteren. Under Article 2 of the Constitution, which deals with the president's responsibilities, Obama has a duty to ensure that laws are "faithfully executed." But to meet that test, he only needs to make sure the money his administration spends is authorized by Congress. And though this may be news to Palin, Congress has spent merrily during Obama's presidency through the use of appropriations, continuing resolutions and the budget reconciliation process.

Palin choice for veep

To say that Palin ought to know better is to expect too much enlightenment from someone who says Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., tops her list of candidates to be the GOP's vice presidential candidate. West recently pandered to the fears of some of his right-wing backers when he irrationally proclaimed that 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party are members of the Communist Party.

Palin is a captain in the swift-boat fleet — the same type of smear tactic used against John Kerry in 2004 — that Republicans have launched against Obama. Her mission is to inflict as much damage on him as possible — and to do it in any way she can. Back in December, she got off an early salvo when she criticized the president for sending out a Christmas card that showed his dog in front of a fireplace decorated with a holiday wreath, bulbs and ribbons. It was "odd," she said, that the card had no overt religious symbols or emphasis on "family, faith and freedom."

Of course Palin saw nothing wrong with the religious symbols-free holiday card Republican President George W. Bush sent out shortly after she and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., were defeated in the 2008 presidential election by Obama and his running mate, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del. That's because neither logic nor good sense has anything to do with her swift-boating attacks on Obama.

DeWayne Wickham writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

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Democrat ad attacks Republicans ahead of New Hampshire debate (Daily Caller)

As the 2012 Republican presidential candidates meet in New Hampshire tonight to debate who’s more conservative, it appears there will be an uninvited guest – namely, the Democrats.

As the debate plays out, an ad from a liberal health care reform group will continue its second day of heavy airtime in the Boston market. The Medicare ad, from Protect Your Care, attacks the Republican candidates where they could be must vulnerable in the near future. The simple 30-second ad ends with a simple message: “Stop the Republican Plan to Cut Medicare.”

Tim Pawlenty and the other hopefuls are expected to hit Mitt Romney hard over the former Massachusetts governor’s own health care plan. Romney must simultaneously defend his plan while proving his own conservative credentials. It’s the Paul Ryan budget plan, however, that will have every serious contender walking a fine line between praising the idea of the plan and not opening themselves up to Medicare-focused attacks from Democrats and groups like Protect Your Care.

Democrats are concerned enough about other issues — like an unimproved economy — to start attacking all the Republican candidates very, very early in the process. It’s a curious strategy and, as if the debate ad blast wasn’t enough, former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs will also be in New Hampshire tonight offering a rebuttal of the Republican debate.

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