Romney says Obama campaign all about 'hatred'

 

Mitt Romney complained that Barack Obama's re-election bid was steeped in "hatred" while the president said his Republican foe would strip the elderly of state health benefits.

Romney, hoping to turn the Democrat out of the White House after a single term, said that Obama and backers were stoking divides based on income, age and ethnicity, to whip up a sense of "enmity and jealousy and anger."
"The president's campaign is all about division and attack and hatred," Mitt Romney told CBS News. "My campaign is about getting America back to work and creating greater unity in this country."
"The president seems to be running just to hang onto power -- I think he'll do anything in his power to try to get reelected," he said.
Obama denied running a divisive campaign, but admitted that controversial remarks by Vice President Joe Biden -- who told a crowd in the former slave-owning state of Virginia on Tuesday that Republican banking policies would "put y'all back in chains" -- had been a "distraction."
"What Joe Biden was talking about, again, is an example of a substantive argument, a substantive issue that the American people should be concerned about," Obama told the "Entertainment Tonight" program.
"His phrasing is a distraction from what is at stake."
Romney had earlier characterized Biden's remarks as "one more example of a divisive effort to keep from talking about the real issues."
The Obama campaign responded to Romney's outburst by implicitly questioning whether the Republican's temperament was suited for the Oval Office.
"Governor Romney's comments ... seemed unhinged and particularly strange coming at a time when he's pouring tens of millions of dollars into negative ads that are demonstrably false," Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said Tuesday.
"Hope it's not hateful to say that Mitt's budget math doesn't add up," wrote Obama senior advisor David Axelrod on Twitter.
The president, wrapping up a three-day bus tour of Iowa, the state that served as his launchpad in 2008, declined to wage a tit-for-tat battle, as he tapped the political firepower of his popular wife Michelle.
"Your president knows what it means when a family struggles. This is not a hypothetical situation for him. He knows what it means to want something better for your kids and your grandkids," Michelle Obama said.
"That's why I love him. That's why I married him."
Obama also opened a new assault on Romney on health care for the elderly, taking aim at his Republican running mate Paul Ryan, who backs a voucher plan for patients to buy private health insurance.
"I think they know their plan's not very popular. You can tell that because they are being pretty dishonest about my plan," Obama told a 3,000-strong crowd, which included many seniors, in front of a red brick brewery here.
Romney had earlier accused Obama of pulling $700 million from Medicare to pay for his landmark health reform, which Republicans oppose. Obama in turn accused his rival of throwing "everything at the wall to see if it sticks."
"I have strengthened Medicare. I have made reforms that have saved millions of seniors with Medicare hundreds of dollars on their prescription drugs," Obama said, adding that his reforms would not touch a "dime" of benefits.
"Mr Romney and his running mate have a very different plan. They want to turn Medicare into a voucher program," he said, warning that such vouchers would not keep up with fast-rising health care costs.
The row over Medicare, a popular federal government program, could be pivotal in electoral battlegrounds with substantial populations of retirees, including Florida, the largest US swing state.
Most political experts believe the race to the November 6 election remains close, with Obama perhaps slightly in the lead and well positioned in the dozen or so swing states that will decide whether he gets a second term.
Obama argues that Romney, a multi-millionaire former venture capitalist, would further enrich his wealthy friends with tax cuts -- and put the burden on a middle class struggling to cope in a slow economic recovery.
Romney paints Obama as out of ideas and an enemy of job-creating small businesses, saying the president is bent on a big government takeover of many aspects of American life and has failed to ignite the sluggish US economy.

Posted in: World economices