surrogates, robert gibbs, the folks in the trenches, are out there sort of icing that with this narrative that mitt romney doesn t play fair, he s never played fair and there s something dastardly going on in the cayman islands. the romney campaign calls this a character attack. it s correct to call it that. this is part of the campaign, this is not about the tax policy debate or about what mitt romney actually did with his money. this is trying to build a frame around mitt romney as somebody who is out touch. the obama campaign claims we are not attacking him for being wealthy but the whole narrative that they re trying to build around him is using his wealth to make it clear that he s out of touch with middle class america and he doesn t understand their lives because they don t have offshore accounts. do you think, when we talk about the administration or the re-election campaign has been threading a needle on the private equity stuff. i do think, you say cayman islands, offshor
explicitly that governor romney changed his arguments here about taxes to echo what rush limbaugh said. do you think this is an effective way to get beyond the tax word choice debate and get into what s inside mitt romney s heart? i think they re trying to get him in this box where if he stays with his, you know, basically everything he s done for the last year has been selling out, where his entire campaign for the president has been a demonstration that in axelrod s words, that romney has no core. i think that s an argument they didn t feel was really sticking and they kind of moved away from, actually, over the spring. it seems they re getting back to their core character attack on him. a bit of a double whammy where they are also trying to say he s a hostage. there was some debate, do you paint him as an extremist or a man can no core, a flip-flopper. to thread the needle, they say he has no core so he follows
american success. he says i should be president because i was good and successful at bain. he says i have experience creating jobs. and he s it s his claim to fame. and they were successful. 80% of the company how can obama not attack the argument of why he s president. my point is if you re going to make a character attack like this, you better get your facts straight and they didn t. that s the problem. that s why cory booker is calling it nauseating and ed ren dell saying these are cheap. they got their health benefits taken away, their pension taken away. and who was running bain when this happened? last night, president obama update here, president obama criticized romney s business sense, let s listen to the president on this point you can respond. he is saying my 25 years in
magnitude, this is the stuff you would see prosecuted in the fall postlabor day. these are the heavy guns of the campaign, and the obama campaign made the decision they have to they have to undercut his ability to present himself as a job creator and businessman. they re throwing everything at him now so they can introduce him to the american people. so he didn t have a lot of charges, they were cost cutting companies and flipping them it s easy because it s not true. that s not fair, who are these people in television that keep saying they re people that worked at a factory two years after mitt romney two years after mitt romney. but this is the problem. if you re going to turn this into a character attack that s what it is. these ads are an attack.
consumer-driven economy like that of the united states, how people feel is the key determina determinant. the number you ll tell our viewers about shortly is consumer sentiment, how do you feel about the economy now, how do you feel about it in the future, and this number is as strong as it s been since october of 2007. i want to take you back to october of 2007 and tell you what was going on. dow was at 14,000. it had set a new record. we had just started to see weakness on the housing front. but things were still feeling pretty good. it was only after that, only after october into december of 2007 when the recession started did people start to say, uh-oh, something is wrong with this economy. remember, john, it s when people, americans, consumers start to feel something is wrong, they start to act that way, they spend less, and this starts to create job losses. so this is very key that we re back up to where we were in october 2007 when things felt pretty good. it s key,