BOSTON — Mitt Romney yesterday kept President Obama on the ropes, pummeling him on the stump and in a new Web video for telling successful business owners, “You didn’t build that.”
“It wasn’t a gaffe. It was instead his ideology — collective success,” Romney told a rally at a truck-repair business in Roxbury, Mass.
“I just don’t think the president, by his comments, [has] an understanding of what makes America a unique nation. If you attack success, you’ll see what we’ve seen over the past few years — less success.”
Romney also hit Obama with a Web video highlighting the remark, made last week at a campaign stop in Virginia, which has gained more and more negative attention with each passing day.
The video replays Obama’s comment and shows the incredulous reaction from Jack Gilchrist, of the Gilchrist Metal Fabricating Company in New Hampshire.
“My father’s hands didn’t build this company? My hands didn’t build this company? My son’s hands aren’t building this company?” asks an irate Gilchrist in the video.
He continues: “Did somebody else take out the loan on my father’s house to finance the equipment? Did somebody else make payroll every week or figure out where it’s coming from? President Obama, you’re killing us out here.”
Romney simultaneously opened an assault on another front, slamming Obama for not meeting with his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness for the last six months.
Romney, who was on his heels for much of last week, smells blood in the water and is laboring to inflict as much damage as he can on Obama while the wound is fresh, pulling together the Roxbury event at the last minute.
The setback for Obama coincides with a new Quinnipiac poll that shows Romney pulling even in the swing state of Virginia at 44 percent. In March, Obama led Romney 50-42 percent in the same poll.
Obama tried to fend off the painful attacks with his own Web video that accuses Romney of taking the “You didn’t build that” comment out of context.
In Obama’s video, text on the screen explains: “Mitt Romney is launching a false attack.”
It then plays a clip of Obama also saying in the speech in Virginia: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life.”
It ends with text that reads: “Mitt Romney will say anything.”
Stumping in Jacksonville, Fla., yesterday, Obama slammed Romney for “squeezing more money out of seniors” by backing efforts to turn Medicare into a voucher program.
“So if that voucher isn’t worth enough to buy the health insurance that’s on the market, you’re out of luck, you’re on your own,” Obama said in the battleground state.