Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is defending presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign staff shake-up as a normal tactic in a presidential race, despite blistering criticism from conservatives that some of the Republican nominee’s closest advisers are basically incompetent.
“I don’t think it’s unusual at all,” Hutchison said, noting that Romney “has a good team” and is simply adding to it to bolster his mission of defeating President Barack Obama.
“I think in a campaign you want to continue to build because there are more issues, more places to go, more things that you have to deal with,” the Texas senator said Thursday night on Fox News’ “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.”
Hutchison also disagreed with conservative Republican critics, who have suggested Romney has no rallying message and has blown a number of opportunities to draw clear differences between his own views and those of Obama.
“I think he’s done a very good job of drawing the issues about Obama,” Hutchison said, stressing the election “is about Obama’s record and the high unemployment, the over-regulation, the taxes that are going up at the end of this year, and Obama healthcare, which is a massive government overreach.”
“That is the issue in this campaign,” she added, noting that Romney “has been very specific” about his plan to repeal Obamacare. “We need a change, and Mitt Romney is that change.”
But Hutchison did disagree with a Romney official’s description of failure to comply with the insurance mandate in Obamacare as a “penalty” and not a tax.
“I think it is a tax increase,” she said, without directly mentioning the disagreement earlier this week over the mandate that put the Romney campaign at odds with the talking points of Republican leaders in Congress.
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