Obama Campaign Maps Mitt Romney's Foreign Money
The Obama campaign has launched a new assault against presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney with a new battleground state TV ad and online info-graphic , both attacking his business dealings and offshore investment accounts.
"As a corporate CEO, he shipped American jobs to places like Mexico and China, as Governor, he outsourced state jobs to a call center in India. He's still pushing tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas," the ad's narrator says. "It's just what you expect from a guy who had a Swiss Bank Account ."
The Romneys reported on their 2010 tax returns that they had kept $3 million in an account with the Swiss bank UBS. The account was closed in early 2010 but it was not reported publicly on financial disclosure forms as required by law until earlier this year.
The account has become a focal point for Team Obama, which seeks to portray the former Bain Capital head as secretive and scheming, and out of touch with average Americans.
"Mitt Romney has invested his money around the world, from the Cayman Islands to Ireland to Australia. We don't know if he's using these accounts to avoid paying his fair share in taxes, but we do know that in 2010, Romney's tax rate was a startlingly low 13.9%," the Obama campaign said in a statement adjoined to an online info-graphic mapping out Romney's investment holdings.
The map, which the Obama campaign blasted out on email and social media networks, shows trusts and partnerships in Bermuda, Ireland, Germany, Luxembourg, Australia, the Cayman Islands and Switzerland - all of which were reported on Romney's 2010 tax returns.
The 30-second TV ad, which will air in Virginia, Ohio, and Iowa, is Obama's second multi-state ad buy directly attacking Romney, and his fourth major television buy of the campaign.
The Romney campaign says the blitz is meant as a "distraction and diversion" from a sluggish economic recovery under Obama ahead of the April jobs report due Friday.
"With the worst job creation record in modern history and the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression, President Obama is trying to distract Americans from the real issues with a series of sideshows," said Rommey spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg.
"Unable to defend his failed record of 23 million Americans struggling for work, wasteful boondoggles like Solyndra, skyrocketing national debt, and unacceptably high energy prices, President Obama has once again resorted to attacking Mitt Romney. The American people have suffered enough over the last three years and deserve better."
The Obama campaign said today's ad is, in part, an attempt to answer a series of television commercials unveiled by pro-Republican outside groups that have been hammering Obama on the airwaves for weeks.
Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt called the charges in those ads, "dishonest attacks that have been consistently debunked by independent fact checkers."