DNC chairwoman says Romney, GOP lawmakers 'rooting for economic failure'

The chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), said congressional Republicans and Mitt Romney seem to be “rooting for economic failure” after they panned the latest jobs report.

Wasserman Schultz appeared Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” to defend President Obama’s economic policies and responded to a Labor Department report released Friday that showed employers slowed hiring more than expected in March. The economy added 120,000 jobs, far short of the 200,000 that most economists expected.

“I’d say we’re making slow but steady progress, but like the president said, we’ve got a ways to go,” the Democratic Party chief said. She pointed out that the economy has produced 25 consecutive months of private sector job growth and more than four million jobs during the Obama administration.

Romney, the GOP presidential frontrunner, and other Republicans criticized the jobs report as weak and said it was a further indictment of the president’s failure to lead a strong recovery.

“What’s really bothersome to me,” Wasserman Schultz said, “is that it almost seems like my Republican colleagues in Congress and Mitt Romney are rooting for economic failure. I mean, they’ve been hyper-focused on one job, Barack Obama’s, for really the last two years.”

“We all need to be pulling together to be moving the economy forward for the middle class and working families,” she added.

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