On the Web and at the White House, Obama to Hammer Romney Wednesday
With the withdrawal of Rick Santorum from the GOP presidential nomination race, the Obama team is going after Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney with a new aggressiveness, seeking to depict him as out of touch and a poster boy for tax inequality.
The campaign today releases a web video - "Mitt Romney: Memories to Last a Lifetime" - featuring a montage of Romney moments from the primary that the Obama campaign seeks to keep alive - from "corporations are people" to "I like being able to fire people," from "severely conservative" to a pledge to veto the DREAM Act.
This morning the president will continue to push the so-called " Buffett Rule," which would require that millionaires are taxed at a rate of at least 30 percent. In making that argument, he will be joined by millionaires and their secretaries who support this tax increase.
The Buffett Rule would add an additional $47 billion in revenue to federal coffers over the next decade, the White House says.
As the White House does this, the Obama campaign will put on its website a calculator that allows people to see what they'd pay in taxes if they paid Mitt Romney's 2010 tax rate of 13.9 percent - a perfectly legal tax rate, since most of Romney's income that year was through investments not income, but one that President Obama wants to raise.
While President Obama focuses on income inequality, Romney and his campaign will focus on bleak economic news - the five million Americans who have given up looking for work, the disproportionate number of women who have lost their jobs during the last three years, and other trends.
The Romney campaign argues that the Buffett Rule wouldn't create one job.
"It's no surprise with the worst job creation record in modern history and a platform of raising taxes that President Obama would try to distract Americans from the real issues," said Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul. "Unemployment is up, incomes are down and gas prices are through the roof. Mitt Romney is running to get Americans back to work and the country back on track."
-Jake Tapper