Continuing the barrage of attacks against Mitt Romney, an outside group allied with President Obama on Wednesday unveiled a web ad depicting the former Massachusetts governor as a candidate who would put corporate and Tea Party interests ahead of the middle class.
Priorities USA Action, a Democratic super PAC run by former Obama staffers, is spending some $100,000 on a social-media ad campaign to promote the 97-second spot, titled “Mitt Romney’s America.” The glossy ad, set to a foreboding score, frames Romney as a corporate loyalist who would advance Tea Party ideology, deregulate Wall Street at the expense of middle-class jobs and stack the Supreme Court with conservatives. It includes the now-infamous decades-old image of Romney and his colleagues at Bain awash in dollar bills and mugging for the camera, as well as snippets of video capturing Romney’s oft-cited assertion that “corporations are people.”
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Bill Burton, a senior strategist for Priorities USA and a former deputy press secretary for President Obama, said the video was part of what will be a continuous effort to juxtapose Obama’s vision for the country with Romney’s. “We are beginning the process of helping Americans know the truth about what Mitt Romney’s America would look like,” Burton said.
For Obama boosters, the process of defining Romney has been underway for some time. But it has accelerated during the past week, with the President’s loyalists launching attacks against the former Massachusetts governor. In some ways, the new negative ad reflects a tactical shift, since it portrays Romney as a conservative ideologue rather than a political opportunist. Over the weekend, Obama senior advisor David Plouffe argued that Romney “has no core.” On Meet the Press, Plouffe said of Romney, “If he thought … it was good to say the sky was green and the grass was blue to win an election, he’d say it.” And the Democratic National Committee recently launched a website, whichmitt.com, intended to revive the familiar criticism that Romney has changed positions on multiple policy issues.
Whatever their line of attack, the broadsides demonstrate that even as a beleaguered Herman Cain sits atop national polls — he leads a new national survey released Wednesday, with 30% to Romney’s 23% — the former Massachusetts governor is clearly the Republican the White House expects to face, and certainly the one it fears.
Andrea Saul, Romney’s spokeswoman, hit back at the Obama Administration in a statement responding to the ad. “More middle class American’s have lost their jobs under President Obama than any president in modern history. While Mitt Romney is focused on his jobs and economic plan, which will provide relief for the middle-income taxpayers, President Obama and his cronies are worried about their own jobs,” she said. “It is no surprise since President Obama cannot run on his failed record that his political allies resort to false and negative attacks on Mitt Romney.”