'This Week' Transcript: Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Sen. Kelly Ayotte

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Sen. Kelly Ayotte are interviewed.

ByABC News
July 12, 2012, 1:57 PM

NEW YORK, July 15, 2012— -- (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS (voice-over): Good morning, and welcome to "This Week." Down and dirty.

OBAMA: When you run for president, everything's called into question.

ROMNEY: Because he sure as heck ought to say he's sorry.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Felony, dishonesty. Charges fly in the presidential campaign's nastiest week yet.

(UNKNOWN): When a president doesn't tell the truth, how can we trust him to lead?

CUTTER: Either Mitt Romney was misrepresenting his position, which is a felony, or he was lying to the American people.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Are these debates fair game or distractions from the big issues? Which side is winning? And how much will voters care come November? Questions for our headliners, the former White House chief of staff and Obama campaign chairman, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte, a top Romney surrogate and potential running mate.

Plus, outrage over those Olympic uniforms made in China...

BOEHNER: You think they'd know better.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And the cover-up of sexual abuse at Penn State.

(UNKNOWN): Sandusky was allowed to continue with impunity.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Those topics and all the week's politics on our powerhouse roundtable, with George Will, Donna Brazile, Matthew Dowd, and that political odd couple, James Carville and Mary Matalin.

ANNOUNCER: From ABC News, "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos. It's your voice, your vote. Reporting from ABC News election headquarters, George Stephanopoulos.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hello again. Everything is happening at hyper-speed in this campaign. Only July, and the Obama campaign has already spent $100 million on campaign ads, most of them going after Mitt Romney. The Romney campaign and its allies have spent about the same, and their latest ad says that the president is lying about Romney's record at Bain Capital. Take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

(UNKNOWN): When a president doesn't tell the truth, how can we trust him to lead? The Obama outsourcing attacks, misleading, unfair and untrue. America expects more from a president. Obama's dishonest campaign, another reason America has lost confidence in Barack Obama.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: And with that, let's get a response from Obama's campaign chair, the former White House chief of staff, current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Good morning, Mr. Mayor.

EMANUEL: Good morning, George.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, Governor Romney himself went even farther than -- than that ad in an interview with ABC's Jon Karl on Friday. He demanded that President Obama apologize for what he called Chicago-style politics that demean the presidency. Any chance he'll get one?

EMANUEL: Well, first of all, you know, it's interesting that -- no, I don't think so, because Mitt Romney said Bain Capital is his calling card for why he should be president. He doesn't talk about Massachusetts as governor. He doesn't talk about any other piece. He says, "I created jobs at Bain Capital."

And everything in that is documented by newspaper clips. And it talks exactly, in President Obama's campaign, about what Mitt Romney's record is in the sense of outsourcing jobs and exactly what the record was at Bain Capital.

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: But, as you know, what he -- what he says is that that outsourcing occurred after 1999 when he left Bain Capital. I know that you all point to that SEC filing that says he was the owner and chief executive...