Mitt Romney’s campaign on Sunday unveiled a new Web video hitting President Obama on the April jobs figures report and saying that millions of Americans were "suffering in silence" from the administration's economic policies.
The ad, titled “Silence” begins with footage from news programs announcing troubling news about the economy, amid clips of Obama speaking at a campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio on Saturday, defending his record.
In the clips from Obama’s address, the president is seen promising an economic recovery and telling voters to look to the future, interspersed with footage of analysts discussing continued job losses.
“It’s not just about how we’re doing today, but how we’ll be doing tomorrow, says Obama.
The video then cuts to a title card which reads, “Today millions of Americans are suffering in silence.”
The ad then follows with graphics highlighting headlines about weak job growth and increasing numbers of workers leaving the labor force.
The video ends with a title card reading: “This is the Obama economy,” with an audio clip of Obama saying, “That’s why I’m running again for President of the United States.”
“Yesterday, President Obama launched his campaign by telling Americans not to ask if they are better off than they were four years ago, but how they’ll be tomorrow,” the Romney campaign said in a release announcing the new video. “This follows a jobs report that found more than 340,000 Americans dropping out of the labor force and an unemployment rate that remains unacceptably high.”
The April jobs report released Friday said that the economy had gained 115,000 jobs and unemployment had dropped to 8.1 percent.
The figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics were lower than what many economists had expected and the drop in the jobless rate was attributed to workers who had given up looking for employment, with the nation’s labor participation rate dropping to a 30-year low.
While Obama said that the figures were positive, noting that the unemployment rate had “ticked down again,” Romney attacked the numbers as “terrible.”
“This is way, way, way off from what should happen in a normal recovery,” the presumptive GOP nominee said in an interview Friday.
