Sen. Rubio: Obama has ‘given up’ on outlining second term agenda

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Sunday charged that President Obama had "given up" on trying to present voters with a second term agenda.

“The most startling thing that has happened here the last month over this campaign is the president has completely given up on outlining any sort of agenda for the future. What’s his plan for the next four years?” asked Rubio, a prominent surrogate for GOP presidential challenger Mitt Romney, on ABC’s “This Week.”

Rubio said that the few policies pushed by the president and his supporters called for “spending a lot of money.”

“That’s what they’ve done for the last four years,” he said. “They are going to spend money on roads, bridges. But we already did that one time, that’s called the stimulus. $800 billion and it didn’t grow the economy.”

Rubio’s comments come as the Romney campaign has opened up a new line of attack, accusing the president of having “no agenda for the future,” and saying that the GOP ticket’s bid would be about “big ideas, bold ideas, a strong agenda.”

"We’re going to get America working again and that’s why you’re going to help elect the two of us,” Romney said at a campaign rally in Florida with running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).

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Earlier Friday, the Obama team accused the GOP candidate of walking back from many policy positions and mischaracterizing his record to win centrist voters in key swing states, saying that Romney was suffering from “Romnesia.”

Rubio dismissed that attack from Obama, saying it fell short of what voters expected to hear.

“That fires up his base, folks that are going to vote for him anyway, but for the rest of Americans who are trying to make up their minds who to vote for, what they’re wondering is ‘well, that’s very cute Mr. President, but what are you going to do for the future, what is your plan to get this economy growing again.’”

Senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod hit back at Rubio's criticisms during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Axelrod said he’d “never seen Sen. Rubio at one of the president’s events,” but that if he were to attend one, he’d hear about the administration’s plans on education, energy and tax reform.

The top strategist said it was Romney who had failed to outline an agenda.

“We have a very specific agenda about how we’d like to move forward,” Axelrod said on. “On the other hand what you hear from Mitt Romney are a bunch of chapter heads with no chapters and a plan to spend $7 trillion more in tax cuts and more money for the Pentagon than they’re even asking for. So if there’s anyone whose running without a real plan here, it’s Gov. Romney, and to the extent he has one it’s going back to the same policies from the last administration.”

New polls show the two campaigns locked in a tight race, with a Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey released Sunday putting the two candidates in 47-47 tie among likely voters and swing-state polls showing many battlegrounds are still a toss up.

This story was updated at 12:21 p.m.

Jonathan Easley contributed.

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