Obama Hammers Romney on Outsourcing vs. ‘Offshoring’ Explainer
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JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images(DURHAM, N.H.) — President Obama today doubled down on his attack on Mitt Romney as an “outsourcing pioneer,” directly rebutting comments made Sunday by the Republican nominee’s advisers Eric Fehrnstrom and Ed Gillespie in network news interviews.
“Just last week it was reported that Gov. Romney’s own firm were pioneers in outsourcing. … Yesterday, his advisers were asked about this and they tried to clear this up by telling us there’s a difference between outsourcing and ‘offshoring,’” Obama said, drawing laughter and boos from the crowd of 1,200 packed into the Oyster River High School gym.
“That’s what they said,” he quipped, “you cannot make this stuff up.”
Gillespie and Ferhnstrom have said that Democrats and the news media have confused outsourcing and offshoring and that Romney, during his time as a corporate buyout specialist at Bain Capital, did not send U.S. jobs en masse overseas. Obama today rejected the explanation.
“What they don’t understand,” he continued, is that “if you’re a worker whose job was sent overseas, you don’t need someone who’s going to explain the difference between outsourcing and off-shoring. … You need someone who’s going to wake up fighting” every day for jobs for you.
Obama said his tax plan would close the “outsourcing loophole” and provide tax incentives to companies that bring jobs back to the United States from overseas. He said Romney’s “commitment to outsourcing” is part of an overarching economic vision that caters to the wealthiest Americans over the middle class.
“I believe their policies were tested and they failed,” Obama said of Republicans’ commitment to tax cuts as the primary approach to boosting economic growth. “And my belief is not just based on some knee-jerk partisan reaction. It’s based on the fact we tried it.”
Rallying his supporters about his plans for a second term, Obama urged optimism: A slightly new message that perhaps gave nod to criticism from some Democrats that he had lost touch with a message of hope.
“It’s fashionable right now for people to be cynical,” he said. “Let me tell you something, there’s no problem out there, no challenge we face that we don’t have the capacity to solve. We are Americans.
“And what’s lacking right now is our politics,” he said. “What’s lacking right now is that some of the worst impulses in our politics have been rewarded, and that’s something entirely within your power to solve.”
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio