then and what s not working now. mitt romney says this is purely a referendum on the president s record, 3 1/2 years in office, and where is the economy? now bill clinton, former president who s been a surrogate for this president, sometimes off message, but a surrogate nonetheless, back in 2010, during the midterm race, he was campaigning and this is how he framed the choice for voters back then. the democrats are saying something like this, look, we found a big hole that we did not dig, and we didn t get out of in 21 months but at least we quit digging. don t go back in reverse. give us two more years, if it doesn t work you have another election just two years you can vote us all out then. well the election is here. things have not changed. why shouldn t people take former president clinton s advice and say, it hasn t worked after one term, we should choose an alternative? well, david, first of all let s remember where we were. we were on the verge of a great depression. cause
advantages governor romney has. i think what this week sees is the one big advantage governor romney has right now. he has one message. it s going to be his message at his convention speech. it will be his message in the debate. it will be his message on the election. the economy is not working, barack obama is in over his head. the president is still searching for a message. we saw in his speech in cleveland, a restart. a reframing. he s done that before. i suspect he ll have to do it again. he s not settled on what he wants to talk about. a second term, or simply what s wrong with mitt romney. right. and you heard from david plouffe, kim, a lot about what s wrong with mitt romney but not a lot of ownership over the past 3 1/2 years. well and that s the question whether or not the speech is going to work. because it was a reframing and an attempt to reach out. the problem he fundamentally has, that speech, 90% of it was about mitt romney. it was the new way of attacking mitt romne
to help romney. it s a remarkable thing. this is just, this is again the department of homeland security, this is an enforcement position. and so, we need a permanent solution. we are a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. the president has often said those two things don t need to be in conflict. and the only pathway here is now senator mccain should get some credit because he unlike a lot of members of his party currently has tried to accomplish something on the congressional forum and ultimately i think we re going to get that done but in the meantime congress hasn t acted. so if they want to do something about this, they ought to pass the dream act right away. this president has dramatically increased the number of deportations, getting illegal immigrants back out of the country. he has not, as he had hoped to do and promise to do, passed comprehensive immigration reform. why do you believe this president has an advantage over mitt romney when it comes to latino voters? w
the private sector is doing fine. the private sector is doing fine. doing fine. it s basically the same ad. yes. i would imagine you would say to mitt romney, hey, that s an unfair knock against president obama just as you thought it was an unfair knock against you. of course not. at the time the stock market had just fallen 700 points. americans were frightened. i wanted to reassure the american people that the fundamentals of our economy were strong. it s still the best system in the world. that s why we have steve jobs and apple and facebook and all of those things. and i still believe that. now, what president obama just said was that the private sector is doing fine. the private sector is not doing fine. and there s more to this than just that comment. it s his overall view. i mean he went on in that same statement to talk about how we need to hire more government workers. that the key to our economy is toics and the bureaucracies of government.
the record. you talk about how bad the problems were. this president knew that and that s why we chose to pass a nearly trillion dollar stimulus. that s why you passed financial reform. that s why you passed a health care law which was about our economic security. so you did some very big things that have not really sparked recovery. so why isn t that part of the record what should really be analyzed? woo are recovering slowly. everybody who worked the financial crisis understands how long president clinton spoke very powerfully about this. it takes a long time to recover from a financial crisis. we are beginning to make progress. we ve obviously got to expedite that and we ve got to stay on the right path. governor romney can talk all he wants about our record we re happy to have that debate. but, it s equally important to say, mitt romney is not just a safe alternative where you wave a magic wand and say oh, he becomes president and all 6 a sudden we re going to have the economy.