In Charlotte, N.C. Wednesday, Mitt Romney gave a speech billed as a “prebuttal” to President Obama’s scheduled Democratic National Convention speech at Bank Of America Stadium in the city later this year.
Denver may have been a better venue for the address, however: Romney’s speech was really more of a late rebuttal to Obama’s 2008 nomination acceptance speech. Romney literally read from a copy of the address, pointing out all the promises Obama made back in summer 2008 that he says went unfulfilled.
Romney even brought up one of the Republican memes from the time: the set on which Obamaw gave the speech. The GOP had a grand time mocking the fake columns at the time, which Obama spoke in front of as onlookers shrieked and screamed.
Romney said those columns won’t make a second appearance in Charlotte.
“He’s not going to want to remind anyone of Greece,” Romney said, “because he’s put us on a road to become more like Greece.”
It’s not new territory for Romney. In a Feb. 7 speech in Denver, Romney read sections of Obama’s acceptance speech and said they were promises that didn’t come true, just as he did Wednesday. And then he went after the columns:
Three years ago, Barack Obama came to Colorado to accept his party’s nomination. He rented out a huge stadium. He hauled in some Styrofoam Greek columns and two giant screens to set the mood. On that big stage in Denver, he made some even bigger promises.
Just a couple days later, Romney gave his own speech in front of similar fake columns at CPAC.
Romney recycled some other past lines in the prebuttal Wednesday. Much like he did before a Philadelphia tea party group Monday night, Romney told the North Carolina crowd he’d put an end to Obama’s divisive war against the rich.
Romney, who’s been gearing up to run against Obama for years, clearly has a playbook for the general and mostly involves casting Obama as a president who failed to deliver. From the very beginning of his campaign, Romney’s has painted Obama as a man who inspired great hope but produced none.
Democrats have their well-rehearsed response.
“This is classic Mitt Romney, which is to actually be completely dishonest about the record that is before him. Rather than running against the president’s real record, he wants to invent one that doesn’t exist,” DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse said on a Democratic prebuttal call to Romney’s prebuttal speech Wednesday morning. “The president promised to cut taxes for 95 percent of working families, he did it. He pledged to end the war in Iraq, he did it. He pledged to draw down what was going on in Afghanistan, he’s doing that. He pledged to support equal pay for equal work, he did that. I mean the list just goes on and on and on.”
