Mitt Romney’s campaign is being attacked by Time Magazine for being “comical” and “one-note” — for being too focused on the nation’s faltering economy.
Time on Monday accused the Republican hopeful of “harping on” about jobs when he should be talking about other issues.
“With almost comical discipline, Romney steers virtually every topic back to Obama’s economic record,” the magazine’s deputy Washington bureau chief, Michael Crowley, wrote. “In a speech to Latino leaders last week, for instance, Romney dodged some key immigration policy questions while harping on Obama’s failure to create more jobs.”
Crowley said that other Romney positions, such as attacking Obama’s foreign policy on China and Iran and promising to slash government spending, “feel like footnotes to Romney’s core message, an almost prosecutorial indictment of Obama’s economic performance.”
He compared the campaign to two successful challenges that also focused mainly on the economy – Ronald Reagan’s in 1980 and Bill Clinton’s in 1992.
“While we remember the defining slogans, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” and “It’s the economy, stupid,” both those contests were more complicated in ways that should give Barack Obama some comfort,” Crowley wrote.
He said both those candidates were far more “personally appealing” than the incumbent presidents, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.
“Crucially, in both cases the challengers were more likeable — or at least seemed so on television. They were the guys most Americans would rather have a beer with.”
In the article, headlined
“One-Note Mitt: Is Romney Too Focused on the Economy?”, Crowley added, “Americans continue to give Obama high personal approval ratings, even as they doubt his job performance. Voters still seem to be figuring Romney out, in part because the Republican has been reluctant to open up about his family, faith and personality; it’s almost as though the Romney campaign believes that the candidate himself is a potential distraction from the winning issue of the economy.”
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