Senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod slammed Mitt Romney over the GOP challenger’s recently released 2011 tax return.
Axelrod charged Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that the return was manipulated to give a false impression of the Romney family’s finances and “boost” the amount Romney paid to the federal government.
“Two months ago, on your own air, he said that anybody who didn’t take the deductions they were owed wasn’t qualified to be president,” Axelrod told host George Stephanopoulos. “Well, I guess he’s not qualified, because that’s exactly what he did last week to try and get his number up from 9 or 10 percent to 14 percent.
“It’s fair to say that a lot of those 47 percent that he was slandering earlier in the week probably pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes overall than he does,” Axelrod said, referring to a leaked campaign video in which Romney wrote off low-income voters as his supporters because they “will vote for the president no matter what.”
Axelrod also questioned Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus’ statement that the Romney campaign has “specifics coming out of our eyeballs.”
“The bigger issue isn’t that he isn’t being straight about his own taxes, the bigger issue is that he isn’t being straight about what he’s going to do to everyone else’s,” he said. “You hear Chairman Priebus say we have specifics coming out of our eyeballs. I don’t think anybody else has seen those specifics.”
Axelrod pointed to Romney’s proposals to cut taxes by $5 trillion and increase defense spending by $2 trillion.
“He’s either going to explode the deficit, sock it to the middle class or both,” he said.
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