President Obama’s first official campaign rallies will be held May 5th. And in a conference call with reporters tonight, his campaign manager Jim Messina and top strategist David Axelrod previewed how they planned to attack Mitt Romney.
“Mitt Romney wants to go back to the future,” Messina said. “Mitt Romney’s economic scheme is familiar and trouble: more budget busting tax cuts for the wealthy, fewer rules for Wall street, the same formula that benefited a few, but that crashed our economy and punished the middle class.”
Axelrod highlighted Romney’s career at Bain.
“His business career was not about job creation, it was about wealth creation for himself and his partners,” he said. “Often it came through vehicles like outsourcing, leveraging companies with debt, bankrupting companies, and making money off of those bankruptcies. Often times, that cost jobs and certainly wages and benefits.”
The campaign also made it clear that if Sen. Rob Portman is picked to be second on the ticket, his time working in the George W. Bush administration will be a focus of the Obama campaign. “Sen. Portman was one of the architect of the, as a budget director, of the last administration’s economic policies,” Axelrod said, when asked about the possibility that Romney could pick Portman.
Axelrod also took a shot at Romney’s political reputation. “We’re not the candidate who reinvents himself from week to week,” he said.
Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul responded to the call in a statement.
“Americans shouldn’t be surprised that President Obama’s campaign will attack Mitt Romney for his experience in creating jobs,” Saul said. “Unfortunately, voters will have to expect that the Obama campaign will be running a campaign based on personal attacks to divert, distract, and distort. Like Mitt Romney said last night, ‘It’s still the economy, and we’re not stupid.’”