The Obama 2012 campaign sidestepped questions about whether it was encouraging class warfare on CNN’s State of the Union this morning.
Obama campaign communications director David Axelrod did not deny that Vice President Biden’s repeated attacks on the ‘big guy’ in a speech at a factory in Youngstown, Ohio last week were not chalked full of class warfare rhetoric.
Do you understand why some people listen to that and do believe that the Obama campaign is engaged in class warfare? – That this was very definitely an attack on the rich?” State of the Union host Candy Crowley asked Axelrod. To which Axelrod replied,”Here is the point, we believe strongly – and most Americans do – that we honor success, we celebrate success, but we want everybody to have a fair chance at it, a fair shot at it. And the question really is moving forward, what kind of economic policies do we want?” ”
Axelrod went on to attack Romney’s record of job creation at investment firm Bain Capital and claim that Romney’s policies would be bad for the ‘middle class.’ Axelrod extended the Obama campaign’s attacks from last week that rather than create jobs, a President Romney would shut down businesses and leave workers high and dry, just like Bain Capital did to GS Steel company.
Crowley attempted to interject that the closing of GS Steel was a natural part of the free-market system and “it happens to a lot of business.”
“This was in a particularly bad time for the steel industry, as you know,” Crowley reasoned.
Axelrod then tried to shift the focus to Crowley, asking her opinion of the matter, once again refusing to directly respond to her questions, before finally addressing the initial class warfare question by making a class warfare argument of his own.
“You ask me was Romney good at making money for himself and his partners? Yes,” he said. “If you ask me whether I think that outsourcing of jobs, offshoring of accounts, bankrupting companies, and profiting off those bankruptcies are a prescription for building the American economy and is a good vision for our future? The answer to that is no.”
However, Romney has pointed out numerous times throughout the course of the primary and now the general election that he was no longer with Bain Capital when the steel mill in question closed down.
“The most recent attacks are really off target and I think they know,” Romney told Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey in a radio interview this week. ”They said, ‘Oh, gosh, Gov. Romney at Bain Capital closed down a steel factory.’ But the problem, of course, is that the steel factory closed down two years after I left Bain Capital. I was no longer there. So that’s hardly something that was done on my watch.”
Romney also pointed out how hypocritical the Obama’s campaign’s class warfare arguments are considering President Obama held a fundraiser hosted by the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm similar to Bain Capital, on the same day his campaign ramped up its attacks on his tenure at Bain Capital.
About Francesca Chambers
[...] went largely unnoticed by both mainstream media and conservative media outlets as of late. While President Obama is waging a class war in America, fellow Democrats are cranking up their efforts to wage a race war, and conservatives are not [...]