WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Wednesday congratulated Mitt Romney on securing the Republican presidential nomination, a gesture coupled with a new line of attack on the Republican challenger that portrays his economic record while governor of Massachusetts as a failure.
The president called Romney and told him “he looked forward to an important and healthy debate about America’s future,” Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said. Romney’s campaign said the call was “brief and cordial.” Both men wished each other’s families well during the coming race.
Romney’s primary win Tuesday in Texas pushed him past the 1,144-delegate threshold he needed to claim the nomination.
Obama took the formal step of congratulating his opponent even as his team looked to shift to the Massachusetts story under Romney. In a five-page memorandum from senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod, the Obama camp cast Romney as a poor steward of the Massachusetts economy during his 2003-07 tenure as governor.
“When it comes to Mitt Romney and his economic philosophy, the facts are clear - it didn’t work then, and it won’t work now,” Axelrod wrote.
Romney’s campaign, meanwhile, was drawing attentionto stimulus projects under Obama and federal money given to companies such as Solyndra, a solar firm that received hundreds of millions of dollars from the government only to go bankrupt.
The competing attack lines came as Romney pivoted from a long primary slog to the Republican nomination and a new summertime window to sway voters who have not yet fully tuned into the presidential campaign. Romney hopes to present himself as a worthy replacement for Obama who can help revitalize a slow-moving economy, the most important issue for voters.
The country is “just beginning a general election. We’ve gone through a primary ... not a lot of people focus time on the characteristics of a new candidate like myself, and people will get to know me better. My guess is they’re going to get to know more about me than they’d like to by the time we’re finished,” Romney said in an interview on Fox News that aired Wednesday but was taped over the weekend.
For months, Obama and his allies have signaled plans to target Romney’s Massachusetts record, with advisers noting that the state’s economy lagged in job creation and saw an increase in debtwhile he was governor. The critique builds upon a line of attack this month of Romney’s record at private equity firm Bain Capital, which Obama’s team contends led to job losses and bankrupt companies even while Bain profited.
“Whether companies succeeded or failed, Romney Economics netted huge profits for him and his investors, but sometimes proved devastating for the middle-class workers whose jobs, benefits and pensions were put at risk,” Axelrod wrote in the memorandum released Wednesday.
Axelrod sought to link Romney’s Bain record with his Massachusetts experience by noting that Romney ran for governor on the basis of his private-sector background. “Under Gov. Romney, the Massachusetts economy was not at the top or even in the middle, but close to the bottom of all the states,” he wrote.
Republicans contend that Obama’s critique of the Bain record will backfire because it will give voters the impression that he is anti-business.
In other developments, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund launched a $1.4 million ad campaign Wednesday attacking Romney as “just wrong for women.”
The TV commercial is aimed at three swing markets - West Palm Beach, Fla.; Des Moines, Iowa; and Northern Virginia, along with Washington, D.C. - and the launch coincided with the organization’s endorsement of Obama’s reelection bid.
The Romney campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Planned Parenthood campaign.
Meanwhile, the Fox News Channel morning show Fox & Friends on Wednesday twice aired a nearly four-minute video that contrasted Obama’s words with negative statistics about his administration in a format that looked similar to a campaign advertisement.
The liberal group Media Matters for America called the video “essentially a four-minute anti-Obama attack ad.” The segment also received criticism from conservative blogger Ed Morrissey, who questioned the video even though he wrote, “I don’t disagree with much, if anything” it says.
“If anyone wanted to look for evidence that the overall Fox News organization intends to campaign against Obama rather than cover the campaign, this video would be difficult to refute as evidence for that claim,” Morrissey wrote.
Late Wednesday, a Fox News executive said the video was not authorized by senior executives at the network, directing responsibility to the show’s producers.
Information for this article was contributed by David Bauder of The Associated Press; by Mitchell Landsberg of the Los Angeles Times and by Brian Stelter of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 05/31/2012