Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is responding to attacks from President Obama with a new ad featuring CBS "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer asking "whatever happened to hope and change?"
The ad, which follows a week of sustained attacks from Obama's reelection campaign about Romney's tenure with private equity firm Bain Capital, uses clips from journalists commenting on negative advertisements from the president.
"When the president was elected, he talked about hope and change," Schieffer says in heavily edited clip from an interview he conducted with senior Obama strategist David Axelrod. "Whatever happened to hope and change? Now it seems he just coming right out of the box with these old-fashioned negative ads.”
The ad also features New York Times columnist David Brooks saying Obama was "starting negative… going extremely tough, extremely hard, looking conventional and frankly, running ads that are inaccurate."
The ad also shows Time Magazine writer Mark Halperin saying, during an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," that "Barack Obama's campaign and allies will run more negative ads against this Republican nominee than have ever been run in the history of the world."
The 30-second ad is the latest salvo from the Romney campaign as they seek to respond to intensified attacks from Democrats who have called into question when he left Bain Capital.
Romney has said he left the company in 1999 to go run the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah, but Democrats have argued that financial filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show Romney remained with the company until his run for Massachusetts governor the year of the Olympic games.
Democrats have raised the issue of Romney's departure date from Bain because they argue that the former Massachusetts governor is responsible for layoffs that occurred at companies that were owned by Bain after 1999.
Romney has called for Obama to apologize, after the president’s deputy campaign manager suggested Romney may have lied, and possibly broke the law, by not accurately acknowledging his departure date from Bain.
But Obama's campaign has refused to back down, releasing an ad this week featuring Romney singing "America the Beautiful" from an earlier campaign speech, while showing headlines about outsourcing which Democrats argue occurred during his Bain tenure.
