TheHill: Mitt Romney delivered a passionate indictment of President Obama’s economic philosophy Thursday in St. Louis, accusing the president of attacking “the cornerstone of American prosperity — our economic freedom.”
In one of the Republican presidential nominee’s liveliest campaign stops of the general election, Romney rallied supporters with a prolonged defense of free market economics. Breaking from his traditional stump speech, Romney decried the president’s economic policies as a “moral failure.”
“Sadly, it has become clear that this president simply doesn’t understand or appreciate these fundamental truths of our system. Over the last three and a half years, record numbers of Americans have lost their jobs or just disappeared from the workforce or can only find part time jobs,” Romney said. “This is not just a failure of policy; it is a moral failure of tragic proportions. Our government has an absolute moral commitment to help every American help himself, him or herself, and that commitment has been broken.”
It appears this tact began the previous day:
TheWashingtonExaminer: In an appearance in Texas Wednesday, Mitt Romney charged that President Obama "knowingly slowed down the recovery in this country…in order to put in place Obamacare." The president's action, Romney said, "deserves a lot of explaining."
Speaking to an audience at USAA, an insurance and financial services company headquartered in San Antonio, Romney cited a book, "The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery," by the liberal journalist Noam Scheiber. In the book, Scheiber discussed Obama's thinking on the question of whether, early in his term, to focus more attention on passing a national health care law or to devote more energy to bringing about economic recovery. As Scheiber put it, Obama saw health care as a bigger long-term accomplishment. "There was a strain of messianism in Barack Obama, a determination to change the course of history," Scheiber wrote. "And it was this determination that explained his reluctance to abandon his presidential vision." So health care it was.
The bottom line: On Obama's priority list, passing Obamacare ranked higher than economic recovery. Mitt Romney is likely to talk about that a lot more as the campaign goes on.
James Pethokoukis wrote a piece yesterday that elaborates on Noam Scheiber's book, particularly a chapter entitled "The Big Diversion," which Pethokoukis sarcastically asks, "Gee, how could Romney ever conclude from Scheiber’s book that maybe, just maybe, Obamacare was a big distraction from doing more to boost the economy?" Distraction indeed. So instead of maintaining a laser-like focus on the recovery of our economy, or perhaps we should say the health of our nation, Obama unsurprisingly chose to focus on his legacy: Obamacare.
On this, we must find agreement...and if Romney genuinely wants to be our next President, he must drive this message home every day from now until November.
