US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney tried on Tuesday to drive a wedge between US President Barack Obama and former US president Bill Clinton, who has taken an increasingly prominent role in Obama’s re-election effort with three months left until the election.
A new Romney campaign ad tries to cast Obama as a big-government liberal, accusing him of dismantling the groundbreaking welfare reforms Clinton put in place.
The Democrats recently announced that Clinton would have a prime speaking role at the party’s national convention in September, which will serve as a formal push into the final weeks of campaigning for the November election.
Photo: Reuters
With the race tight and Romney and the Republicans leading in fundraising for a third straight month, the Democrats are seeking to take advantage of Clinton’s popularity and strong economic record while in office.
However, the new Romney ad criticizes Obama for removing work requirements from federal welfare regulations, a key element of Clinton’s 1996 welfare reforms. The ad contends that Obama simply wants to hand out welfare checks, while Romney would restore the work requirement.
“We will end a culture of dependency and restore a culture of good hard work,” Romney told an audience on Tuesday in Illinois.
Obama’s “policies will take America backward — back to the discredited liberalism of a bygone era, where bigger government programs and bigger government checks were the answer to every problem, and accountability was not on the agenda,” said Lanhee Chen, Romney’s policy director.
Obama campaign spokesman Lis Smith said Romney was “not telling the truth” in his attacks.
“By falsely attacking a policy that both he and his Republican allies have supported for years, Romney is once again flip-flopping on a position he took in Massachusetts and demonstrating that he lacks the core strength and principles the nation needs in a president,” Smith said.
The White House said Obama’s decision last month to change welfare requirements gives states the flexibility they have been asking for to make the program more efficient. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, was among several Republican governors who signed a letter in 2005 asking for more “waiver authority.”
This year’s election hinges on which candidate voters decide is best to deal with the struggling US economy and high unemployment. Polls show Obama and Romney in a virtual tie.
Clinton is also helping the Democratic-leaning independent group Priorities USA Action boost its sluggish fundraising. The former president will host an event in New York next week to help it raise money.
Priorities USA Action released a new television advertisement on Monday targeting Romney’s business record at Bain Capital, the private equity fund he ran. The ad features a former employee at GST Steel who lost his job and health insurance when Bain closed the steel plant in 2001.
The man says he does not think Romney “understands what he’s done to people’s lives.”
Meanwhile, the White House on Tuesday knocked down a report that Obama feared that Romney wants CIA chief and Iraq war veteren David Petraeus as his running mate.
“Be mindful of your sources,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told a reporter who queried him on the claim carried by the conservative-leaning Web site the Drudge Report.
Drudge had earlier thrown the explosive rumor into the melting pot of speculation surrounding Romney’s looming announcement of his vice presidential nominee, expected within days.
The site, an online news pioneer, carried a story on Tuesday quoting an “insider” as saying that Obama had whispered to a supporter this week that he thought Romney wanted to select the popular retired general.
“The president wasn’t joking,” the site quoted the “insider” as saying.
Petraeus, renowned as the mastermind of the Iraq War troop surge strategy, who also served Obama as his top general in Afghanistan, was sworn in as new CIA chief in September last year.
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