Obama on Fire in Iowa: Calls Out Romney’s Bait and Switch

President Obama was on fire in Davenport, Iowa Wednesday on the first stop of his two-day, non-stop “America Forward!” tour. Obama reminded voters that Romney’s economic plans don’t add up, referring to the Washington Post calling the Republican’s jobs plan a “bait and switch.” The President emphasized the issue of trust, saying, “(T)here’s no more serious issue in a presidential campaign than trust.”

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TRANSCRIPT
Listen, smart people who don’t have a dog in this fight, independent analysts, economists, they took out their pencils, they had their green eye shades, turns out Governor Romney’s economic plan is a sketchy deal. The results aren’t something you’d want to write home about. The Washington Post called his jobs plan a “bait-and-switch.” The bait is the promise that his plan creates 12 million jobs. The switch is the fact that his plan doesn’t create 12 million jobs. In fact, it won’t even create jobs right now.

Then, Governor Romney wants to spend $5 trillion on tax cuts that favor the wealthy, $2 trillion more on defense spending that our military isn’t asking for, and he wants you to believe that he can do all this without adding to the deficit or raising middle-class taxes. The problem is, you’d need to invent a new kind of math to actually make this true. The arithmetic does not work.

So we know Governor Romney’s jobs plan doesn’t really create jobs. His deficit plan doesn’t reduce the deficit. We joke about Romnesia. But all of this speaks to something important: trust. There’s no more serious issue on a presidential campaign than trust. Trust matters.

END TRANSCRIPT

The President has laid out a specific plan to contrast with Romney’s ever-changing rhetoric on his own policies. President Obama focused on trust as an elevated discussion about Romnesia. Mitt Romney won’t disclose his tax returns, he won’t tell the American people what his tax plan is, he wouldn’t be honest about his foreign policy in the last debate, and he reverses positions faster than you can fact-check him on his last statement.

The question I always come up against with Mitt Romney’s failure to disclose the truth is why? There can only be one reason, and that is that he knows his policies aren’t popular. They won’t get him elected. And so over and over again, on policies from women’s issues to jobs plans to war with Iran, Romney tells his base one thing and reverses course for the general public.

Which does he mean? Hard to know, but the folks he surrounds himself with and choses for plum positions tell us that he is aligned with the Bush Cheney Rumsfeld folks in foreign policy and the Paul Ryan Todd Akin tea party types on social issues. Romney is an extremist because that’s what he needed to be to get where he is today.

There is not one major issue that Romney has been transparent about and faithful to. He has changed on every single major issue raised in this campaign, talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Trust matters, and so do words.



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