The Obama campaign is out with a new ad in Ohio, a critical battleground state, hammering Mitt Romney for his dismissal of 47 percent of Americans as Obama-backing “victims” who leech off the government. Last week, Mother Jones broke the story of Romney’s “47 percent” comments, publishing leaked video of a private fundraiser, held in Florida last May, where Romney made the remarks.
The Obama ad uses the leaked video showing Romney saying “my job is not to worry about those people”—by which he means the 47 percenters. The ad’s narrator then asks: “Doesn’t the President have to worry about everyone?”
Days after Romney released his 2011 tax returns showing he paid a rate of 14.1 percent, the new Obama ad also rips Romney for paying far less in taxes than middle-class Americans, and for refusing to release more than two years’ worth of returns. “Maybe instead of attacking others on taxes,” the narrator says, “Romney should come clean on his.”
The ad comes as Romney begins a bus tour of Ohio this week. Democrats will hold events highlighting Romney’s 47 percent remarks during a parallel Ohio bus tour of their own. “Mitt Romney is either massively insulting half of Americans or he’s massively out of touch with our lives—and while he tours Ohio, the DNC and Ohioans are going to call him out for it,” the Democratic National Committee said.
Obama supporters are also using Romney’s controversial remarks as a fundraising tool, blasting the video around to current and potential donors, Reuters reports. Ted Strickland, the former Ohio governor and now Obama campaign co-chair, said: “If we can’t win this election [after the 47 percent video], God help us.”
