With auto sales increasing in June, Barack Obama seeks to capitalize on his efforts to save the U. S. auto industry while Mitt Romney said that Detroit should be allowed to go bankrupt. One would hope that Obama also hits home on just how out of touch Romney - with many overseas bank accounts and tax haven investments - is when it comes to the needs of everyday Americans who go sleepless at night worrying about how they are going to pay their bills and keep a roof over their families or pay for medical costs. Between his many homes, hidden bank accounts, and plans to tear down a seaside mansion to build a larger one Romney seems to think the the Gilded Age has returned. Meanwhile, he wants to repeal Obamacare and deny health care insurance to some 30 million Americans. Personally, Romney strikes me as totally incapable of having empathy for others. To him, everything is a calculated question of "what's in it for me." Merely doing the right thing because it IS the right thing never crosses his mind. Yes, many politicians can't be trusted, but Romney seems not only as untrustworthy but uncaring to boot. The Washington Post looks at Obama's rust belt campaign swing. Here are highlights:
The 2010 Republican electoral rout in the industrial Rust Belt was decisive and complete, with the GOP sweeping the gubernatorial and Senate races in the key presidential battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan. In the aftermath, Democratic prospects for 2012, particularly President Obama’s, seemed bleak.
But less than two years later, the dynamics have changed. Things are looking up for the president, and the best evidence may be three Senate Democrats who will head into the final sprint of this year’s campaign as clear favorites, having weathered the worst of the tea party storm in the region.
Obama is helped by the better-than-average employment picture in Ohio and Pennsylvania, both of which recorded rates of 7.3 percent in May, while the national level remained at 8.2 percent. Michigan’s unemployment rate in May was 8.5 percent.
On the bus tour his campaign is calling “Betting on America,” Obama spent his first day emphasizing gains in manufacturing and his administration’s bailout of the American auto industry, hoping to appeal to workers in heavily union areas. The title is an unsubtle jab at Romney, who has faced questions about offshore personal bank accounts and investments by Bain Capital, made during his time as head of the firm, in companies that eventually outsourced jobs abroad.
“When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse. . .Governor Romney said we should just let Detroit go bankrupt,” Obama told a crowd of 500 supporters in this manufacturing town just south of Toledo. “I refused to turn my back on communities like this one. . . And three years later, the American auto industry is coming roaring back.”
Obama is paying special attention to Ohio where he kicked off his 2012 campaign with a speech in Columbus in May and delivered a major address on the economy in Cleveland last month. Ohio has voted for the winning candidate in 10 consecutive presidential elections and no Republican has ever won the presidency without winning Ohio. Consequently, both campaigns are spending heavily here in advertising dollars and manpower hours.
A pair of polls released last week gave Obama an edge in both Ohio and Pennsylvania: 47 percent to 38 percent in Ohio, and 45 percent to 39 percent in Pennsylvania, according the Quinnipiac Poll.
Eugene Robinson has a column in the Washington Post that underscores Romney's out of touch nature when it comes the rest of us. Here are excerpts:
Most Americans, for example, do not have an individual retirement account valued at between $20 million and $101 million, as Romney stated last year in a financial disclosure report.
When Romney was running Bain and building up his IRA, the maximum annual contribution permitted by the tax code was $2,000. So how did Romney’s IRA get so huge? He won’t say. It’s possible that he rolled over some money that was originally in a 401(k) retirement plan of the kind offered by many employers. But annual 401(k) contributions were then capped at $30,000, including an employer match — in Romney’s world, chump change.
Then there’s the question of a Bermuda-based company that Romney and his wife, Ann, own, Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd. According to the Associated Press, the company has been part of Romney’s portfolio for nearly 15 years, but it was not mentioned in any state or federal disclosure reports. It surfaced in Romney’s 2010 tax returns, which he reluctantly released earlier this year.
Channeling private-equity and hedge-fund investments through offshore firms in places such as Bermuda and the Caymans can allow investors to avoid a tax on what is known as “unrelated business income.”
[O]ne of the sources of anger and anxiety in this country — on the left and the right — is the sense that there are two sets of rules, one for the rich and powerful and one for everybody else. I don’t think voters want a “regular guy” as president; they want someone who is exceptional. But there is a point at which opportunism begins to shade into rapacity.
In making and managing his money, Romney appears to take every possible, conceivable, imaginable inch that the law arguably allows. That’s good finance. But I doubt it’s good politics.
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