Mitt Romney lashed out at President Obama as “angry and desperate” and told him to “take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago” in a Tuesday night speech that takes the race to a new level of vitriol.
”He's intellectually exhausted, out of ideas, and out of energy,” Romney said in excerpts of a speech he delivered in Chillicothe, Ohio. “And so his campaign has resorted to diversions and distractions, to demagoguing and defaming others. This is an old game in politics; what’s different this year is that the president is taking things to a new low.”
Romney said Obama’s campaign and surrogates “have made wild and reckless accusations that disgrace the office of the presidency. Another outrageous charge came a few hours ago in Virginia. And the White House sinks a little bit lower. This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like.”
The Obama campaign has said been calling Romney hypocritical and saying he needs to get his own campaign out of the gutter. On Tuesday night, spokesman Ben LaBolt wrote in an email: “Governor Romney's comments tonight seemed unhinged, and particularly strange coming at a time when he's pouring tens of millions of dollars into negative ads that are demonstrably false."
Romney’s campaign is running two ads accusing Obama of gutting welfare’s work requirements that Democrats, fact checkers and a few Republicans have labeled false. He is also running ads attacking Obama over a pro-Obama super PAC ad that implies Romney’s actions as chairman of Bain Capital led to a woman’s death from cancer. The Priorities USA Action ad, which fact checkers have debunked, has run online but not on TV except once by mistake, the PAC said.
The “outrageous charge” Romney referred to was when Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday told a Danville, Va., audience, which included African-Americans, that Romney’s economic and fiscal policies would “unchain” Wall Street and put them “back in chains.” He later defending the remark, saying "The last time these guys unshackled the economy, to use their term, they put the middle class in shackles."
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