President Obama’s campaign slammed Mitt Romney on Tuesday for setting a "double standard" to evaluate economic growth, blasting it with a series of three new infographics comparing the U.S. economy to that of Massachusetts's and a video featuring Obama’s deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, charging Romney with “breath-taking" hypocrisy.
"The Romney campaign's entire message this week is based on a double standard that we can't let them get away with," Cutter says in a video posted on the campaign's official YouTube page.
"They're saying don't hold Mitt Romney accountable for the first three years he was in office, because he inherited a bad economy," she said. "Yet these same people blame the president for job losses that occurred in January 2009, the very month he was inaugurated, and months before any of his policies took place. The hypocrisy is breath-taking, even for Romney.”
The Obama campaign released the three infographics comparing the growth of the U.S. economy to that of Massachusetts's under Romney, first comparing Massachusetts from December 2003 through March 2006 to the U.S. economy from February 2010 to May 2012 and then by "the Romney campaign's preferred measurement," comparing just the last 12 months of Romney's tenure as governor to the most recent 12 months in the United States.
The Obama campaign also charges that Massachusetts’s job growth under Romney was sluggish compared to the country’s overall economic recovery.
The Romney campaign, in response, cited the disappointing jobs report released last week and continued to charge that Obama is seeking a distraction from his own record.
“The Obama campaign will do anything to distract from the president's abysmal economic record and the latest devastating jobs report,” said Romney spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg in a statement.
“As governor, Mitt Romney closed a $3 billion deficit, cut taxes, balanced four budgets, and helped lower the unemployment rate to 4.7 percent," she continued. "Under President Obama, the unemployment rate is 8.2 percent, our debt and deficits have skyrocketed, and we are heading in the wrong direction. Mitt Romney made things better, Barack Obama hasn’t.”
Obama's campaign began hammering Romney last month on his record in the private sector at Bain Capital and then over his record as governor of Massachusetts. The Romney campaign fired back that they were "happy to compare the 4.7 percent unemployment rate Mitt Romney achieved in Massachusetts to President Obama’s weak record any day," which likely prompted Tuesday's attack.
Tuesday’s campaign video builds on a new trend by the Obama campaign of posting videos of campaign aides speaking to the camera, part of their "Truth team" effort, which is styled as a rapid-response "fact check" for countering misinformation online.
Cutter, in Tuesday's video, urges viewers to share Tuesday's video through various digital tools: email for grandparents, Facebook for friends, Twitter for people who spend all their time there, "and if you know people are on Tumblr, well, you know what to do."
