White House senior adviser David Plouffe sought to portray GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney as unfit for the nation’s top office.
Plouffe, on NBC’s Meet the Press, repeated Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod’s assertion that the former Massachusetts governor has “no core,” and then laid into him further.
“What you need in that office is conviction, you need to have a true compass, and you have got to be willing to make tough calls,” Plouffe said. “You get the sense with Mitt Romney that if he thought it was good to say the sky was green and the grass was blue to win an election, he would say it.”
Plouffe said that on “issue after issue after issue, he has moved all over the place.”
“[Romney] was supportive of doing things like a cap-and-trade agreement, now he doesn’t think that climate change was real. He was to the left of Ted Kennedy on gay rights issues, now he wants to amend the constitution to prohibit gay marriage. He was an extremely pro-choice governor, now he believes that life begins at conception and would ban Roe v. Wade,” Plouffe said.
Herman Cain and Romney are sitting atop the GOP field, though Romney is seen as more likely to get the nomination on the strength of his political and fundraising organization.
Many social conservatives are wary of Romney because of his changed-positions on issues like abortion-rights. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who has tried to coalesce conservatives as an anti-Romney candidate, has made many of the same flip-flopping arguments that Plouffe and the Obama campaign have.
Plouffe said it’s too early to say who in the GOP field that President Obama is most likely to face in the general election.
“This is going to have a lot of twists and turns,” he said, comparing the state of the GOP primary nomination fight to the first inning of a baseball game.
All the GOP hopefuls, he said, are “offering the same economic policies that lead to the great recession.
