By Matt Spetalnick
WASHINGTON, April 25 (Reuters) – President Barack Obama,
seeking to sharpen contrasts with Mitt Romney, said on Wednesday
his presumptive opponent in the November election won’t be able
to disavow conservative views he embraced in the race for the
Republican presidential nomination.
Obama, in a Rolling Stone magazine interview released the day
after Romney swept five primaries and claimed victory in the
Republican contest, sought to feed perceptions of the former
Massachusetts governor as a politician who flip-flops on issues
to suit the moment.
“I don’t think that their nominee is going to be able to
suddenly say, ‘Everything I’ve said for the last six months, I
didn’t mean,’ ” Obama said. “I’m assuming that he meant it. When
you’re running for president, people are paying attention to
what you’re saying.”
The Democratic president’s comments jibed with a re-election
campaign strategy of casting him as champion of the middle class
who will face the standard-bearer of a Republican party that
turned sharply to the right and is beholden to the rich.
Romney, a relative moderate in his party who toughened his
rhetoric as the bitter Republican race dragged on, went as far
as describing himself as “severely conservative” when he
addressed a conservative Republican group in Washington in
February.
But his speech on Tuesday night focused almost exclusively
on attacking Obama for his handling of the economy and contained
little of the conservative rhetoric that marked the Republican
primary season fight.
While Republicans want to make the election a referendum on
a fragile economic recovery and stubbornly high unemployment
under Obama, the president and his Democrats want to make the
focus more about income inequality in his face-off against
Romney, the wealthy former head of a private equities firm.
“The general election will be as sharp a contrast between
the two parties as we’ve seen in a generation,” Obama told
Rolling Stone, a magazine with a large readership among younger
voters he wants to re-energize for his campaign.
“You have a Republican Party, and a presumptive Republican
nominee, that believes in drastically rolling back environmental
regulations, that believes in drastically rolling back
collective-bargaining rights, that believes in an approach to
deficit reduction in which taxes are cut further for the
wealthiest Americans,” he said.
The interview, conducted on April 9 when Romney was already
seen as the all-but-certain Republican nominee, was released as
Obama was finishing a three-state tour to push for low rates on
federal student loans, an issue that resonates well with younger
voters.
Obama never mentioned Romney by name in his public speeches
in North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa but alluded to him several
times.
Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom created an uproar recently
when he said the start of the general-election campaign would be
an Etch a Sketch moment, interpreted as meaning that Romney
would try to wipe clean the slate from the primary campaign and
present himself as a moderate to the broader electorate.
(Reporting By Matt Spetalnick; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
