Romney makes his case: ‘Need jobs, lots of jobs’

Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee Mitt Rom­ney points to the pho­tog­ra­pher as he and vice pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee, Rep. Paul Ryan, right, pose for a group photo with cam­paign staff before the Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion in Tampa, Fla., on Thurs­day. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

DAVID ESPO, ROBERT FURLOW

Asso­ci­ated Press

TAMPA, Fla. — Mitt Rom­ney launched his fall cam­paign for the White House in a rous­ing Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion finale Thurs­day night, pro­claim­ing Amer­ica needs “jobs, lots of jobs” and promis­ing to cre­ate 12 mil­lion of them in per­ilous eco­nomic times.

“Now is the time to restore the promise of Amer­ica,” Rom­ney said in excerpts released in advance of his prime-time speech to a nation strug­gling with 8.3 per­cent unem­ploy­ment and the slow­est eco­nomic recov­ery in decades.

He muted his crit­i­cism in the advance excerpts of Pres­i­dent Barack Obama, his quarry in a close and unpre­dictable race for the White House.

“I wish Pres­i­dent Obama had suc­ceeded because I want Amer­ica to suc­ceed,” he said. “But his promises gave way to dis­ap­point­ment and division.”

“This isn’t some­thing we have to accept ‚” he said, appeal­ing to mil­lions of vot­ers who say they are dis­ap­pointed in the pres­i­dent yet haven’t yet decided to cast their votes for his Repub­li­can challenger.

“Now is the moment when we can stand up and say, ‘I’m an Amer­i­can. I make my des­tiny. And we deserve bet­ter! My chil­dren deserve bet­ter! My fam­ily deserves bet­ter! My coun­try deserves better!”

Romney’s remarks came after other speak­ers filled out a week-long por­trait of the GOP nom­i­nee as a man of fam­ily and faith, savvy and suc­cess­ful in busi­ness, sav­ior of the 2002 Win­ter Olympics, yet care­ful with a buck. A por­tion of the con­ven­tion stage was rebuilt overnight so he would appear sur­rounded by del­e­gates rather than speak­ing from a dis­tance, an attempt to soften his image as a sometimes-stiff and dis­tant candidate.

“He shov­eled snow and raked leaves for the elderly. He took down tables and swept floors at church din­ners,” said Grant Ben­nett, describ­ing Romney’s vol­un­teer work as an unpaid lay clergy leader in the Mor­mon church.

Fol­low­ing him to the podium, Ted and Pat Oparowski ten­derly recalled how Rom­ney befriended their 14-year-old son David as he was dying of can­cer. “We will be ever grate­ful to Mitt for his love and con­cern,” she said.

Beyond the heart­felt per­sonal tes­ti­mo­ni­als and polit­i­cal hoopla, the evening marked one of a very few oppor­tu­ni­ties any pres­i­den­tial chal­lenger is granted to appeal to mil­lions of vot­ers in a sin­gle night.

The two-month cam­paign to come includes other big moments — prin­ci­pally a series of one-on-one debates with Demo­c­rat Obama — in a race for the White House that has been close for months. In excess of $500 mil­lion has been spent on cam­paign tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials so far, almost all of it in the bat­tle­ground states of Florida, North Car­olina, Vir­ginia, New Hamp­shire, Ohio, Iowa, Col­orado and Nevada.

Rom­ney holds a fundrais­ing advan­tage over Obama, and his high com­mand hopes to expand the elec­toral map soon if post-convention polls in Penn­syl­va­nia, Michi­gan, Wis­con­sin and per­haps else­where indi­cate it’s worth the invest­ment. In a speech that blended the polit­i­cal and the per­sonal, Rom­ney talked in his excerpts of the impor­tance of the love he felt from his par­ents and that he and his wife Ann have sought to give their chil­dren and grandchildren.

“All the laws and leg­is­la­tion in the world will never heal this world like the lov­ing hearts and arms of moth­ers and fathers,” he said.

As for Obama, he said, “Many Amer­i­cans have given up on this pres­i­dent, but they haven’t ever thought about giv­ing up. Not on them­selves, Not on each other. And not on America.”

The econ­omy is issue No. 1 in the race for the White House, and Rom­ney pre­sented his cre­den­tials as the man bet­ter equipped than the pres­i­dent to help cre­ate jobs. Speaker after speaker tes­ti­fied to the help their received from Bain Cap­i­tal, the pri­vate equity firm that he cre­ated — and that Democ­rats argue often took over firms, loaded them down with debt and then walked away with huge fees as they slid into bankruptcy.

“When I was 37, I helped start a small com­pany,” he said. “That busi­ness we stated with 10 peo­ple has now grown into a great suc­cess story.

Rom­ney knows the value of dol­lar, del­e­gates were assured.

“When I told him about Sta­ples, he really got excited at the idea of sav­ing a few cents on paper clips,” busi­ness­man Tom Stem­berg said of the office sup­ply store chain he founded with back­ing from Bain Cap­i­tal, the pri­vate equity firm the pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee co-founded.

There was no short­age of Obama-bashing, though.

For­mer House Speaker Newt Gin­grich, shar­ing the stage with his wife, Cal­lista, said Obama was a pres­i­dent in the Jimmy Carter mold. Both “took our nation down a path that in four years weak­ened America’s con­fi­dence in itself and our hope for a bet­ter future,” he said.

For­mer Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said that “in the fourth year of a pres­i­dency, a real leader would accept respon­si­bil­ity” for failed poli­cies. “Pres­i­dent Obama hasn’t done that.”

Romney’s aides did not say whether he would offer any new infor­ma­tion on what has so far been a short-on-details pledge to reduce fed­eral deficits and cre­ate 12 mil­lion jobs in a coun­try where unem­ploy­ment stands at 8.3 percent.

Rom­ney would have to nearly dou­ble the cur­rent, ane­mic pace of job growth to achieve 12 mil­lion jobs over four years. That’s con­ceiv­able in a healthy econ­omy. In fact, Moody’s Ana­lyt­ics, a finan­cial research oper­a­tion, expects nearly that many jobs to return in four years no mat­ter who occu­pies the White House, absent fur­ther eco­nomic setbacks.

Romney’s steps for achiev­ing the employ­ment growth include deficit cuts that he has not spelled out and a march toward energy inde­pen­dence that past pres­i­dents have promised but never delivered.

Rom­ney has called for exten­sion of tax cuts due to expire at all income lev­els at the end of the year, and has pro­posed an addi­tional 20 per­cent cut in tax rates across the board. But he has yet to sketch out the retrench­ment in tax breaks that he promises to pre­vent deficits from rising.

Nor has he been forth­com­ing about the tril­lions in spend­ing cuts that would be needed to redeem his pledge of major deficit reduc­tion, or about his promise to rein in Medicare or other gov­ern­ment ben­e­fit pro­grams before they go broke.

His vice pres­i­den­tial run­ning mate, Wis­con­sin Rep. Paul Ryan, the chair­man of the House Bud­get Com­mit­tee, has called for remak­ing Medicare into a pro­gram in which the gov­ern­ment would send seniors checks to be used to pur­chase health care insurance.

Under the cur­rent approach, ben­e­fi­cia­ries pay pre­mi­ums to the gov­ern­ment, which then pays a part of all of their med­ical bills, and Democ­rats say the GOP alter­na­tive would expose seniors to ever-rising out-of-pocket costs.

Rom­ney said in his fundrais­ing email, as he often does in his speeches, “We believe in Amer­ica, even though Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s failed poli­cies have left us with record high unem­ploy­ment, lower take-home pay and the weak­est econ­omy since the great Depression.”

Obama’s sur­ro­gates missed no oppor­tu­nity to crit­i­cize Rom­ney, the con­ven­tion pro­ceed­ings or Ryan’s own accep­tance speech.

“He lied about Medicare. He lied about the Recov­ery Act,” Obama’s cam­paign man­ager, Jim Messina, emailed Demo­c­ra­tic donors in a plea for cash.

“He lied about the deficit and debt. He even dis­hon­estly attacked Barack Obama for the clos­ing of a GM plant in his home­town of Janesville, Wis­con­sin — a plant that closed in Decem­ber 2008 under George W. Bush.”

For Rom­ney, 65 and the first Mor­mon to become a major party pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee, the evening sealed a tri­umph more than five years in the mak­ing. He ran unsuc­cess­fully for the nom­i­na­tion in 2008 after a sin­gle term as a mod­er­ate Repub­li­can gov­er­nor of a lib­eral Demo­c­ra­tic state.

This year, as then, he was assailed as a con­vert to con­ser­vatism, and a ques­tion­able one at that, as Gin­grich, for­mer Penn­syl­va­nia Sen. Rick San­to­rum and other rivals bat­tled him for the nom­i­na­tion. With a supe­rior orga­ni­za­tion and an out­side group that spent mil­lions crit­i­ciz­ing his foes, Rom­ney even­tu­ally emerged as the nom­i­nee in early spring.

His selec­tion of Ryan, a young law­maker admired by fel­low con­ser­v­a­tives for his under­stand­ing of the fed­eral bud­get, rein­forced Romney’s appeal to the right.

The econ­omy alone makes the race a close one, and polling makes clear that Rom­ney enters the fall cam­paign with strengths and weaknesses.

In the most recent Asso­ci­ated Press-GfK poll, con­ducted Aug. 16–20, some 48 per­cent of reg­is­tered vot­ers said Rom­ney would do a bet­ter job han­dling the econ­omy, while 44 per­cent chose Obama. The Repub­li­can was also favored nar­rowly on job cre­ation and held a 10-point advan­tage on the issue of reduc­ing fed­eral bud­get deficits.

Yet by 51–36, reg­is­tered vot­ers said Obama bet­ter under­stands the prob­lems of peo­ple like them, that the pres­i­dent is a stronger leader and also a more hon­est and trust­wor­thy candidate.

Posted by AP News on Aug 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.