Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson says President Barack Obama no longer has anything to offer the American people except a rewrite of history, which has put his re-election campaign “between a rock and hard place.”
“For the last three-and-a-half years, he has been demonstrating he doesn’t understand the economy and what to do about it,” Thompson told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren Thursday night. “They came in very convinced that Keynesian economics would bail them out. They were very brash about what they thought the unemployment percentage would be, after their policies were instituted.
“Dead wrong about that — dead wrong about the effect of the stimulus . . . So now, they can only resort — he can only resort — to going back,” Thompson said. “And the reason he stumbled so much lately is because he is looking backwards all the time — that’s his strategy, apparently.”
Thompson, a Republican presidential candidate in 2008, described the president as a leader who has “literally run out of things to say” about how to get the nation’s economy back on track and, as a result, is simply making excuses and laying the blame on former President George W. Bush.
“The president is rewriting history,” Thompson said, referring to Obama’s speech in Ohio Thursday where he talked about “the failed policies of the past.”
“The policies of George W. Bush should not be measured by the last 24 hours or the last year of his administration,” Thompson said in defense of Obama’s predecessor. “The fact of the matter is the Bush tax cuts didn’t cause this debt, didn’t cause this deficit. After the Bush tax cuts, we had the greatest increase of revenue for the federal government in history.”
Asked about Romney’s chances of beating Obama in November, Thompson cautioned Republicans against overconfidence.
He said Romney has improved as a candidate on the stump lately, but suggested he still has a ways to go in terms of shaping his own policies to deal with the country’s economic problems.
“At the end of the day,” he said, the winner will be the one the American people feel can do the most for the economy and “the one that will be the best caretaker going forward instead of looking back.”
But, he added, “I think Romney’s getting his legs under him.”
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