The Obama campaign listened to Mitt Romney’s fiery speech about the president’s economic vision Wednesday. They’re pushing back, saying they heard the former Massachusetts governor channeling some of the more extreme voices in the GOP — most notably the man who increasingly looks like he could steal the nomination away.
“In a transparent shift in strategy, Mitt Romney today echoed Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, and Sarah Palin in stating that middle class Americans who are struggling – no matter if they work hard and play by the rules – are at fault for the challenges they face,” Obama campaign spokesperson Ben LaBolt said. “Instead of believing that Americans are greater together, he believes the middle class and those fighting to enter it are on their own.”
In his speech, Romney attacked Obama over what he said was the president’s vision for an “entitlement state” where individual success is limited and “everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk.”
This followed Obama’s speech in Kansas yesterday where he called for a free market system with “rules of the road to ensure that competition is fair, open, and honest.”
LaBolt said Romney is in effect calling for the opposite:
“[H]e’s stacking the decks against [the middle class] by adopting the same policies that created the economic crisis we’re still recovering from — more tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires and large corporations and letting Wall Street write its own rules again,” he said. “And Mitt Romney has made abundantly clear that he’s willing to outsource American jobs to enrich himself and his partners regardless of the consequences for middle class families.”
No matter who clinches the GOP nomination, then you can expect a lot more of this type of back-and-forth. Essentially it boils down to the question of whether regulations make economic life freer and fairer in the long term. Obama’s answer to that is yes, and for many Republicans the answer is no – or, at least, that in the short term it will boost productivity and that’s really all that matters.
