Romney hits back at Obama
President won’t ‘share his real plans,’ GOP front-runner says
WASHINGTON – Mitt Romney unleashed a strong attack on President Barack Obama’s truthfulness Wednesday, accusing him of running a “hide-and-seek” re-election campaign designed to distract voters from his first-term record while denying them information about his plans for a second.
Addressing an audience of newspaper editors and publishers, Romney said Obama’s recent remarks to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on a second-term arms reduction treaty had called “his candor into question.” Romney, the likely GOP opponent for Obama in November, also accused the president of undergoing “a series of election-year conversions” on taxes, government regulation and energy production.
“He does not want to share his real plans before the election, either with the public or with the press,” Romney said. “By flexibility, he means that what the American public doesn’t know won’t hurt him. He is intent on hiding. You and I will have to do the seeking.”
Romney himself has been sharply criticized by Rick Santorum and other Republican rivals for changing his own positions on issues ranging from abortion to climate control as part of an attempt to win the backing of conservative primary voters. Earlier this year, he reversed course on the minimum wage to bring his stance in line with party orthodoxy, saying he no longer believes it should rise along with inflation.
Romney spoke to the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors as the Republican nominee-in-waiting.
He campaigned Wednesday in Pennsylvania, where there’s a GOP primary April 24 – though Romney treated it more like the general election battleground it will be in the fall. “Please help me defeat Barack Obama in November!” Romney told a cheering crowd in Broomall, a Philadelphia suburb. Romney will also campaign in Pennsylvania today.
The former Massachusetts governor holds a commanding lead in delegates to the Republican National Convention and is on a pace to clinch the party’s top prize by the end of the primary season in June.
The bulk of Romney’s remarks amounted to a rebuttal of sorts to Obama, who spoke from the same stage on Tuesday to the annual meeting of the Associated Press. The president said a newly drafted Republican budget in Congress represented a radical vision. “It is a prescription for decline.”
Romney disagreed. He said that instead of laying out plans for a second term, Obama “railed against arguments no one is making – and criticized policies no one is proposing. It’s one of his favorite strategies, setting up straw men to distract from his record.”
The Republican highlighted two areas in which he said Obama has been particularly opaque about his plans, one involving presidential comments made recently to Medvedev and the other relating to the future of the government’s largest benefit programs, Social Security and Medicare.