Democrats are using the surprisingly robust jobs numbers announced Friday to attack Mitt Romney as a flip-flopper.
The Democratic National Committee released a Web ad that argues Romney hasn't been consistent in his statements about whether President Obama has hindered the economic recovery.
"Today, the DNC released a video highlighting Mitt Romney’s range of views on whether the President made the economy worse — or not. On the stump, Romney likes to say the President made the recession worse and made it harder for the economy to recover. But on Laura Ingraham’s radio show he points out the difficult line he walks by acknowledging the facts: that the President took hard steps to turn the economy around and now the economy is getting better," the DNC said in a statement.
The ad opens with text proclaiming that "Mitt Romney changes his views a lot on a lot of issues" — a theme the DNC has sounded repeatedly since Romney emerged as the favorite for the GOP nomination. It then launches into a montage of Romney providing both blame and credit to Obama for the state of the economy.
"Mitt Romney does have his story straight … some of the time," the ad concludes, before fading to a chart, circulated by the White House, that shows improvement in private-sector employment under the Obama presidency.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed Friday at its highest level since May 2008 — before the brunt of the economic recession — buoyed largely on the jobs data. The employment report found that the U.S. added 243,000 jobs in January, nearly 100,000 more than most projections, while the unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent.
Romney dismissed the numbers in a statement earlier Friday.
“We welcome the fact that jobs were created and unemployment declined,” Romney said. “Unfortunately, these numbers cannot hide the fact that President Obama’s policies have prevented a true economic recovery. We can do better.”
