Romney drops gloves, goes on offense

SALT LAKE CITY — The Mitt Romney campaign went on
offense early this week, after a slow and fumbling initial
response to aggressive attacks from President Barack
Obama’s camp, in which Obama operatives went so far as to
suggest Romney might be guilty of a felony. That
suggestion earned a rebuke and
three Pinocchios from the Washington Post.

Speaking in Pennsylvania on Monday, Romney delivered a
free-wheeling attack on Obama’s speech last Sunday.
Obama raised eyebrows when he said, “If you’ve
got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else
made that happen.”

Romney retorted that the “idea to say that Steve Jobs
didn’t build Apple, that Henry Ford didn’t
build Ford Motor,” Romney said, speaking freely from rough
notes but no teleprompter, “that Papa John didn’t
build Papa John Pizza, that Ray Kroc didn’t build
McDonald’s, that Bill Gates didn’t build
Microsoft, you go on the list, that Joe and his colleagues
didn’t build this enterprise. To say something like
that is not just foolishness, it is insulting to every
entrepreneur, every innovator in America, and it’s
wrong.”

Romney advisers are now speaking in very aggressive terms
to reporters, including Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins, who quotes one Romney
operative saying that Obama’s “policies have been such
utter failures, the only thing he can do is to try to
destroy a decent man and his wife,” the adviser said. “So
he gets some hack political adviser from Chicago who has
nothing to point to in her own life, and tells her to call
him a felon. … When did our politics get to that point?
I mean, it’s Nixonian.”

John Sununu, Romney’s national campaign chairman, held a
call with reporters earlier this week which Power Line’s
John Hinderaker described as “nuclear.”

Hinderaker wrote, “(Sununu) said that Obama’s
comments show three related things: 1) The President
doesn’t understand how America and business work. No
wonder his administration has failed to create jobs. 2)
Obama’s crony capitalism: He thinks the way to
create jobs is for the government to pick winners and
losers, and slide money to Obama’s bundlers and
allies. 3) Obama’s attitude toward small business
also reflects where he comes from, the ‘murky political
world’ of Chicago where politicians and felons are
interchangeable.”

Sununu also suggested that Obama
has “no idea how the American system
functions” because he was “in Hawaii smoking
something,” and then “spent the next set of
years in Indonesia.” Sununu later apologized for the
remark, but it seems to reflect the aggressive new tone in
the Romney camp.

Eric Schulzke writes on
national politics for the Deseret News. He can be
contacted at eschulzke@desnews.com.

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