Mitt Romney's campaign released a new ad Thursday that knocks President Obama over the economy and accuses him of failing to stand up to China.
The ad shows two stacks of boxes in a warehouse, meant to represent manufacturing jobs in China and the United States. Boxes from the American stack gradually decline, as more and more are added to China's pile, which grows above that of the United States.
"Under Obama, we’ve lost over half a million manufacturing jobs, and for the first time, China is beating us," the ad's narrator says.
The ad then knocks the president for not citing China as a currency manipulator, despite having seven opportunities to do so.
“Seven times, Obama could have stopped China’s cheating. Seven times, he refused," the narrator said.
The ad then cuts to video of Romney speaking to supporters.
“It’s time to stand up to the cheaters and make sure we protect jobs for the American people," the Republican nominee says.
Onscreen text then labels Obama as "failing to stop cheating" and "failing American workers."
“Candidate Obama campaigned on a promise to take China ‘to the mat’ for their currency manipulation — but President Obama just hasn’t delivered," said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul in a statement. "For nearly four years, the president has repeatedly refused to crack down on China’s cheating, and American workers are the ones who have paid the price."
The Obama campaign has aggressively hit Romney on overseas jobs throughout the campaign, pointing to his work at Bain Capital and arguing he helped in shifting jobs overseas. In a statement Thursday, spokeswoman Lis Smith pushed back strongly against the Romney charges, pointing out that many of the jobs losses highlighted by Romney occured just as Obama was taking office.
“Mitt Romney’s senior advisor said that their campaign wouldn’t be beholden to fact checks and they proved that again today," said Smith. "The job losses that his new ad references occurred in the first months after the President took office. Now, American manufacturers have added half a million jobs since January 2010 – the fastest manufacturing job growth since the 1990s. If Mitt Romney really cared about holding China accountable, he wouldn’t have criticized the President for standing up to China on behalf of American tire workers, he wouldn’t continue to hold investments there, and he wouldn’t have proposed a tax plan that could create hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas, including jobs in China."
This post was updated at 1:40 p.m.
