Romney: Bain Attacks Part of Obama’s “Character Assassination” Attempt
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Ethan Miller/Getty Images(JACKSONVILLE, Fla.) — Mitt Romney said Thursday that he is “disappointed” in President Obama’s campaign for being “focused on character assassination,” specifying that he considers the president’s attacks on his career at Bain to be an attempt to make him appear to be “not a good person or not a good guy.”
“I have been disappointed with the president’s campaign to date, which is focused on character assassination,” said Romney. “I just think that we’re wiser to talk about the issues of the day, what we do to get America working again, talk about our respective records.”
When asked to specify what he considers to be a character assassination, Romney pointed to the recent advertisement released by the Obama reelection campaign that pegged him as a “job destroyer” for his time at Bain Capital.
“Obviously his efforts to look at my work at Bain is to try to characterize me in a way that isn’t accurate,” said Romney. “My effort at Bain Capital, as you know, was in effort case designed to make the enterprises we invested in more successful, to grow them.”
“There’s this fiction that some have that somehow you can be highly successful by stripping assets from enterprise and walking away with lots of money and killing the enterprise. There may be some people who know how to do that. I sure don’t,” said Romney. “And the purpose of the president’s ads are not to describe success and failure but to somehow suggest that I’m not a good person or not a good guy and I think the American people will know better than that if they don’t already.”
Romney, referring to a New York Times report Thursday morning that detailed the plans of a conservative group to develop an ad that would link Obama to the controversial pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., said that he saw glimpses of character assassination in that ad, too.
“Having a campaign focused on character assassination is one of the things I find offensive among many others in the PAC description that came in the New York Times,” said Romney.
“If that’s accurate, why, that’s something I repudiate,” said Romney.
Romney also revealed that his own campaign plans to release a television ad in the next few days that will be positive.
“I certainly hope that you get a chance to see our first ad, that’ll come up in I think a couple of days, it will be a positive ad on what I would do if I were president,” Romney said. “It’ll be contrasting with the president’s ad, which again is a character assassination ad.”
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