The Biden attacks follow an Obama campaign advert featuring several of the
laid-off steel workers talking bitterly about Mr Romney and Bain, including
one worker who said: “It was like a vampire who came in and sucked the
life out of us.”
The Obama offensive is seen as an attempt to neutralise Mr Romney’s attempts
to portray himself in contrast to Mr Obama as a “turnaround guy”,
with the kind of private sector experience needed to kick-start the US
economy.
To counter the Obama attacks, the Romney campaign released a video telling the
story of Steel Dynamics, a successful investment that saw Bain reap a 500
per cent return on its 1994 investment of $18.3m and created jobs.
“Mitt Romney helped create more jobs in his private sector experience and
more jobs as governor of Massachusetts than President Obama has for the
entire nation,” said Andrea Saul, the Romney campaign spokesman.
“President Obama can’t come close to matching the many years of
experience that Mitt Romney has as a private businessman so he has chosen to
attack the free market.”
Mr Romney has been able to focus his message more sharply as it became clear
that he has won the Republican primary process. He is now just 171 delegates
short of the 1,144 needed to clinch the nomination after winning in
primaries in Oregon and Nebraska on Tuesday.
He has struggled to shrug of the image as a heartless member of the ‘one per
cent’ super rich who cannot understand the travails of ordinary Americans
suffering the worst economic downturn since the 1930s.
But as the Obama campaign continued to paint Mr Romney as a ‘vulture
capitalist’, his team released an emotional advertisement in which
out-of-work Americans talked movingly about the indignity and struggle of
life in the “Obama economy”.
Mr Obama has tried to depict himself as a man from humble roots who can
understand what it is like to struggle to pay the grocery bills while saving
enough “to put the kids through college”.
However his annual financial disclosure shows Mr Obama is now himself a
wealthy man, holding up to $5m-worth of US Treasury notes and two low-tax
college savings accounts worth up to $200,000 to pay for the university
education of his daughters Malia and Sasha.
Royalties from Mr Obama’s books, ‘Dreams From My Father’, ‘The Audacity of
Hope’ and ‘Of Thee I Sing’, totalled between $250,000 and $2.1 million.
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