Quotes of the day

President Obama’s bus tour through Ohio and Pennsylvania late last week offered a striking look at the evolution of a president. In 2008, Obama used soaring rhetoric and personal biography to talk about binding together a red-blue nation. His message today is about the urgent need to defeat a stubborn opposition party in order to move the country forward…

That is a change from the way he talked as a candidate in 2008. His message then was not so much about either-or choices. That was not the message he delivered when he first appeared on the national stage at the 2004 Democratic convention, nor was it the message he offered the night he scored his breakthrough victory in the 2008 Iowa caucuses that launched him toward the White House. He did not talk about elections as tiebreakers between two sides but of a country hungering for a new model for its politics…

Many Democrats say it’s about time that the president got tough, that he spent too much time trying to negotiate with Republicans who weren’t interested in negotiating with him.

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It’s nothing like the first campaign, the former Illinois state legislator and U.S. senator said — when he and his wife circulated fliers printed at Kinko’s.

It sure isn’t…

Off the 68,443 ads that Obama has run on TV (local broadcast, national network & national cable) in the 30-day period ended July 2, 52,016 had an “anti-Romney message” — 76 percent of the total, according to New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, which monitors campaign advertising.

Obama’s negative ads have overtaken his positive ads. Since April 10, when Republican Rick Santorum’s exit essentially made Romney his party’s presumptive nominee, Obama has run 112,202 ads, of which 58,151 were anti-Romney and 54,051 positive.

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Of the 17 TV advertisements Obama has aired here [in Iowa], eight have pummeled Romney’s resume as a governor of Massachusetts and founder of a large private equity firm. Increasingly, the ads have pressed the outsourcing hot button, although independent fact checkers have dressed down that attack as using false or thinly supported claims.

Republicans call it a smear campaign, arguing Romney was not responsible for what companies did after he left Bain Capital. Indeed, they point to Obama as an outsourcer, citing him as responsible for jobs sent overseas by companies who received federal stimulus money.

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Top Democrats repeatedly slammed Mitt Romney on Sunday for his foreign wheelings and dealings, as President Obama’s campaign continues to make the case that the presumptive GOP nominee doesn’t understand the concerns of the middle class…

“He is the first and only candidate for President of the United States with a Swiss bank account, with tax shelters, with tax avoidance schemes that involve so many foreign countries,” Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“When it comes down to his Swiss bank account, there is just no way to explain it,” Durbin added. “You either get a Swiss bank account to conceal what you are doing or you believe the Swiss franc is stronger than the American dollar.”

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Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley (Md.) hammered Mitt Romney on Sunday over a report detailing his use of offshore accounts, saying the presumptive GOP nominee had “bet against America.”…

“He bet against America when he put his money in Swiss bank accounts and tax havens and shelters and also set up a secret company, the shell company in Bermuda, which, by the way, in order to avoid disclosure, he put in his wife’s name right before he became governor of Massachusetts,” O’Malley charged.

His comments come after a Vanity Fair report released last week said Romney’s financial advisers formed a corporation in Bermuda and the GOP candidate maintained holdings in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

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“Being rich is not a problem,” said Bob Shrum, a Democratic consultant who helped Senator Edward M. Kennedy defeat Mr. Romney in their 1994 Senate race in Massachusetts. “Being rich and out of touch is a problem.”

Mr. Romney’s campaign has pushed back hard against some of the wealth-themed attacks, which have included assertions that at Bain he enriched himself by promoting the outsourcing of American jobs. Increasingly the Romney campaign is turning Mr. Obama’s attacks back on him by suggesting that the president is in denial about his record and is out of touch with the economic strains felt by most Americans.

“They just can’t come to grips with the reality of what’s happening out there and the president’s responsibility for it,” said [Stuart] Stevens, [a Romney] campaign strategist.

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Obama campaign senior adviser Robert Gibbs said Sunday that Americans simply don’t know enough about Mitt Romney’s finances to determine if he’s doing anything illegal.

“We don’t know. Nobody knows,” the former White House press secretary said on CNN’s “State of the Union” when asked if the presumptive Republican presidential nominee was skirting tax law.

“The one thing he can do, Candy, to clear up whether or not he’s done anything illegally, whether he’s shielding his income from taxes in Bermuda or Switzerland, is to do what ever other presidential candidate is done and that’s to release a series of years of their own tax returns,” Gibbs told host Candy Crowley.

***

This president has already shown that he’s not who he said he was. He claimed he was going to bring everyone together, he was going to be this uniter. He’s been the most divisive, nasty, negative campaigner this country’s ever seen without running any positive ads.

Skip to 4:45.

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