President Barack Obama will stoop to new lows against not only the presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney, but also anyone who dares defy him, hurling distortions to defuse opponents’ arguments, says Karl Rove.
The former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush wrote in a no-holds-barred Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal Wednesday that Obama’s distortions start with his budget. His tax plan, spotlighting his “Buffett Rule” — a 30 percent tax on anyone making $1 million per year or more — is a smoke-and-mirrors agenda that would not balance the budget “for decades” as Obama claims.
Rove writes that the Joint Committee on Taxation reports that the tax would raise $47 billion in the next 10 years, but Obama’s budget will actually spend $46.9 trillion during that same period.
Rove points to Obama’s eye on current policy — a “loophole” as Obama calls it — of taxing capital gains and dividends at a lower rate than income. Rove writes, “He favors penalizing savings and investment when America needs more of both.”
When Obama warns that GOP cuts would result in students being denied admission, health researchers unable to complete crucial work, and teachers losing their jobs, he employs the very strategy he accused his opponents of using. In his 2008 acceptance speech in Denver, Rove writes, Obama said "If you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from."
Obama is waging class warfare and dividing the nation with partisan rhetoric despite his declaration to end “red America against blue America,” from the “moment he was inaugurated,” says Rove.
Rove advises Romney to “tap into the disappointment and regret that many Americans, even the president's supporters, feel about Mr. Obama.” He says Romney should present Obama’s record of failed policies and outright distortions to counter the president’s rhetoric and instead should offer an optimistic agenda of what measures will be taken to counter these failed policies to reassure voters.
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