(Updates with Obama quotes in Denver)
* Says millions of students getting “third world” education
* Accuses Obama of being unwilling to stand up for kids
* Pivot to education comes during battle over student loans
By Sam Youngman
WASHINGTON, May 23 (Reuters) – Republican presidential
candidate Mitt Romney opened a new front on Wednesday in his
fight against President Barack Obama, accusing him of presiding
over a failing U.S. education system in the grip of union
bosses who refuse to accept reforms.
In a rare diversion from his campaign focus on the weak U.S.
economy, Romney laid out an education plan in a speech that
represented his most overt appeal to date to Hispanic voters who
have largely sided with the Democratic incumbent.
Although he trails Obama by a huge margin among Hispanics,
Romney’s address to a Hispanic business group avoided mentioning
a top priority for them: how to overhaul the country’s
immigration system.
Romney said millions of American children are getting a
“third-world education” and offered proposals that he said would
reward teachers for their results instead of their seniority.
And he would give parents greater choice of where to send their
children to school and take other steps to reduce the influence
of powerful teachers’ unions.
“I believe the president must be troubled by the lack of
progress since he took office. Most likely, he would have liked
to do more. But the teachers unions are one of the Democrats’
biggest donors – and one of the president’s biggest campaign
supporters. So, President Obama has been unable to stand up to
union bosses – and unwilling to stand up for kids,” Romney said.
Meanwhile, at a rally in Denver, Obama kept up criticism of
his opponent’s record as a job-cutting business executive – a
prime target for the president and his re-election campaign.
“I think he has learned the wrong lessons,” Obama said,
pressing a populist attack on what he called Romney’s bad ideas
for the U.S. economy.
“His working assumption is if CEOs, and wealthy investors
like him get rich, the rest of us automatically will too,” he
said.
There has been increasingly heated rhetoric between the two
in recent days over Romney’s time as the head of the corporate
buyout company Bain Capital.
Obama made only a brief mention of education, repeating his
plans to enhance ties between community colleges and businesses
and saying his goal was that “by the end of this decade more of
our citizens hold a college degree than any other nation on
Earth.”
Romney’s pivot to education comes during a battle in
Washington over student loan programs. Obama’s Democrats are
pushing for extending low-interest loan rates for federal loans
to avoid a doubling of the rates from 3.4 percent. A compromise
with Republicans is expected by the July 1 deadline.
The former Massachusetts governor is neck-and-neck with
Obama in polls, a prelude to what could be a close election.
HISPANICS AND EDUCATION
Hispanics will likely be crucial to the election.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC/Telemundo poll showed Obama
leading Romney with Hispanic voters 61 percent to 27 percent.
Romney is only now starting a push to try to peel some of them
away because of their potential influence in swing states like
New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina.
But Romney went almost an hour at his event without
mentioning the U.S. immigration system and how he would deal
with 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States.
In the Republican primary battle, Romney and his rivals
upset many Hispanics by adopting hardline immigration positions.
Romney called for the “self-deportation” of illegal immigrants.
On Wednesday he stuck to education, also a top issue for
Hispanics but one that rarely ignites passion in the campaign.
In the meantime, Obama, whose re-election largely hinges on
what happens with the fragile economy and high unemployment,
accused Romney’s Republicans of “bamboozling folks into thinking
that they are the responsible, fiscally disciplined party.”
Seeking to counter Republican charges of wasteful spending,
Obama insisted that the rate of spending has grown less under
Democratic than under Republican administrations.
Hispanic Republican strategists said Romney was wise to keep
his focus on education and the economy, noting that in several
polls, Hispanic voters rate the economy well ahead of
immigration as the issue they care about most.
“Clearly, it appears that Governor Romney has chosen to
focus on what the vast majority of U.S. Hispanics and Latinos
feel is of highest priority,” said Daniel Garza, from The Libre
Initiative non-profit group.
Standing before a banner that read “A Chance for Every
Child,” Romney laid out an education plan that relies heavily on
bolstering and improving the No Child Left Behind education law
engineered by Obama’s Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.
Romney made more money and more access to charter schools
the centerpiece of his platform, but he launched a strong attack
on teachers’ unions. “The teachers’ unions are the clearest
example of a group that has lost its way,” Romney said.
“COME ON MITT, THINK!
The education speech was a welcome break for Romney, who has
been under a barrage of accusations from Democrats that he
killed blue-collar jobs when he was head of Bain in the 1990s.
Bain bought and restructured companies, sometimes resulting
in a loss of jobs. But Romney says the company more than made up
for that by helping to establish companies that became big
employers, like office supplies store Staples.
He told Time magazine business experience gave him
savvy to fix the economy and he welcomed scrutiny of his record.
“The fact is that I spent 25 years in the private sector. And
that obviously teaches you something that you don’t learn if you
haven’t spent any time in the private sector,” he said.
While Romney often polls ahead of Obama on the economy, the
president’s foreign policy credentials weigh in his favor
compared to the ex-governor, who has little foreign experience.
Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell criticized
Romney for taking advice from foreign policy advisers who are
“quite far to the right,” in an sign of lingering strains from
his tenure under President George W. Bush.
He made clear that he is not happy with some of the
neo-conservatives who are advising Romney and took exception to
a recent comment from Romney that Russia is the top U.S.
geopolitical threat.
“Come on Mitt, think! That isn’t the case,” said Powell.
(For more campaign stories, click on )
(Additional reporting by Laura MacInnis in Denver and Matt
Spetalnick in Washington; Writing by Steve Holland; Editing by
Philip Barbara and Xavier Briand)
