Former U.S. Treasurer Bay Buchanan said Mitt Romney has successfully fended off attacks from President Barack Obama but now needs to articulate to voters how he will turn the economy around and offer a vision so Americans can remember what it was like to have hope again, she told Newsmax.TV.
Buchanan said in an exclusive interview that Romney has “done a good job to make certain that they can’t get away with just beating us up and smearing his reputation.”
But now he needs to “make certain Americans recognize that he understands how difficult their lives are right now, that the situation with unemployment and foreclosures and the drop in the wealth, he understands how this happened and he knows how to turn it around,” the Republican political strategist said.
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She said Romney needs to get specific and say, “’When I’m in office I will do X, Y, and Z, which will create the jobs so Americans can go back to work.’ And then I would add one more thing... I would add that he give a vision. That he says, ‘Listen, these are tough times but America can be great again and I know they can be and I can see it now. I can see the jobs, the factories. I can see the small businesses.’ Give them a vision so that they can remember what it was like to have that kind of hope, that light. "
Romney is trailing Obama among women in polls, Buchanan said, because of politics, not personality.
“You know this is something that it’s not Mitt Romney per se. It’s Republicans versus Democrats, conservatives versus liberals. It was true in Ronald Reagan days as we ran, men loved the fact that he was bigger than life and made some very, very strong statements out there and the women were a little nervous and cautious and hesitant at first.”
She said part of this too is that women tend to be a more cautious sex. “We want stability. We want to know what’s happening tomorrow. So whereas men are often the ones that haste; let’s take a little risk. Let’s try something different.
Let’s mortgage the home and throw the money into a business and it’s just two different ways to approach things so I think Mitt Romney is doing really well with men and with women it’s coming together.”
Buchanan said Obama’s campaign attacks will backfire.
“Barack Obama has a difficult problem,” she said. “He’s the president of the United States so people expect him to act like somebody who is a strong leader and somebody who is trying to direct the country in a positive place. But because his record is so poor he has no choice.”
Buchanan, a political strategist who was recently named as one of the top 10 conservative women in America by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, is the author of “
Bay and Her Boys: Unexpected Lessons I Learned as a Single Mom.”
See the exclusive excerpt from the Newsmax interview with Bay Buchanan:
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