Alicia Cohn
The Hill
President Obama’s opponents quickly jumped to attack him for “forgetting” the state of the economy with a new video released Friday by the Republican National Committee that asks, “how can a sitting president forget about the recession?”
At a campaign event in Seattle on Thursday, Obama described the state of the economy during his first campaign in 2008 as the “worst crisis that we’ve seen since the Great Depression.”
“Sometimes people forget the magnitude of it, you know?” he continued. “Sometimes I forget. In the last six months of 2008, while we were campaigning, nearly 3 million of our neighbors lost their jobs; 800,000 lost their jobs in the month that I took office. And it was tough. But the American people proved they were tougher. So we didn’t quit. We kept going. Together we fought back.”
Mitt Romney’s campaign seized on the idea of Obama’s forgetfulness so portray the president as detached from the reality of the ongoing economic crisis.
“It’s not surprising that a president who forgot to create jobs, forgot to cut the debt, and forgot to change Washington has now admitted that he’s forgotten about the recession,” Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul said in a statement. “In fact, it seems that the President has forgotten that he’s been in office for the last three-and-a-half years.”
The White House has touted improvement in the economy since 2008 as proof that Obama’s policies are working despite having a long way to come from the economy he “inherited” when he first took office.
The RNC and the Romney campaign’s shared line of attack highlights an ongoing strategy to portray Obama as detached from the concerns of every-day Americans, particularly those in the middle-class. The RNC video splits the screen between video of Obama at fundraising events and scenes of economic devastation, following up on previous attempts to tie Obama to the lavish lifestyle of a celebrity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-35SB3eaNc
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/226853-rnc-romney-campaign-say-obama-forgot-the-recession