The Mitt Romney campaign released a television ad on Thursday hitting President Obama over his comment that the private sector is “doing fine.”
“23.2 million Americans are in need of work,” text from the ad reads. “40 straight months over 8 percent unemployment, middle-class struggles deepen under Obama, millions of homeowners underwater on mortgages, the president’s response?”
The ad then plays a clip of President Obama saying, “The private sector is doing fine” four times in a row.
“How can President Obama fix our economy if he doesn’t understand it’s broken?” the ad concludes.
The ad comes as Romney and Obama converge on Ohio for separate campaign events on Thursday.
The Romney campaign has made the remark the central component of its attacks against President Obama over the last week.
The president made the remark at a press conference last Friday in which he pushed Congress to pass portions of his jobs plan, which includes funds for state and local governments to hire teachers, police officers and firefighters. Obama was arguing that while the private sector had seen 27 straight months of job growth and added 4.3 million jobs, the public sector was shedding jobs and dragging on the overall economy.
Senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod on Sunday hit back at the Romney campaign on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“They're more eager to have a debate over an out-of-context clause in his remarks than the substance of what he said,” Axelrod said, adding that the private sector is “certainly doing better than the public sector.”
