Mitt Romney is using Hillary Clinton to lash out at President Obama over his charges on outsourcing.
In a new television ad released Tuesday, Romney's campaign reminds voters that Clinton criticized Obama over a similar line of attack during the 2008 Democratic primary.
"Shame on you, Barack Obama," Clinton, whom Obama picked to be secretary of State, is seen saying in the Romney ad, via a clip from 2008.
Romney's video charges Obama with lying about Clinton.
"Just like he did against Hillary Clinton, President Obama now continues to spread dishonest attacks about Mitt Romney to distract from his failed record," the campaign said in a press release with the ad.
“When a president doesn’t tell the truth, how can we trust him to lead?" the video asks.
The ad follows a series of attacks by President Obama's campaign over the number of tax returns Romney has released, whether he had oversight of an offshore account and whether he had oversight at the private equity firm Bain Capital when it invested in firms that sent jobs overseas. The ad focuses particularly on the outsourcing claim, which was based on a Washington Post report.
According to the ad, Obama's campaign has "no evidence that Mitt Romney shipped jobs overseas.” It goes on to compare Obama's accusations against Romney to his campaign against Clinton.
Obama has attacked Romney as the "outsourcer in chief" since a report by The Washington Post claimed that Romney’s former firm, Bain, invested in companies that specialize in outsourcing jobs.
The Post later clarified that the report only claims that the firm was involved in the practice, not that "transfers of U.S. jobs took place while Romney ran the private equity firm of Bain Capital," but refused to retract its story on the basis of the Romney campaign's criticism.
Romney’s campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul criticized the “flawed” report and charged it did not differentiate between “domestic outsourcing versus offshoring," but Obama on the campaign trail has mocked the response.
“No, what Gov. Romney's advisers don't seem to understand is this: If you're a worker whose job went overseas, you don't need somebody explaining to you the difference between outsourcing and offshoring," Obama said last month.
Romney explained his response strategy to Fox News's Neil Cavuto on Wednesday, saying, "I of course respond to the attacks which come. But you know, they say in politics, if you’re responding, you’re losing. I think the better course for our campaign is to respond to the attacks as being completely off-base."
