TAMPA (Florida),Jan26, 2012(AP): The two leading Republican presidential contenders took a short break from hammering one another, turning their fire on President Barack Obama and calling his State of the Union speech a rehash of what they see as policies that have failed to re-ignite the troubled U.S. economy.Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, again assailed the president with the standard Republican complaint that Obama wants to increase government power and impose higher taxes. “We have a crisis of work in this country, and tonight President Obama proposed nothing in the way of policy changes that will get us to robust job creation and dramatic economic growth,” Gingrich said in a statement Tuesday night. “Instead, the president described his conviction that his big government is built to last and should be paid for with higher taxes.” Romney, who amassed a huge fortune as a venture capitalist before serving one term as Massachusetts governor, did not wait for Obama to deliver the speech before lambasting what he predicted the president would say. “High unemployment and record home foreclosures,” Romney said, speaking from the floor of a shuttered Florida factory. “Debt that’s too high and opportunities that are too few. This is the real state of our union. But you won’t hear stories like these in President Obama’s address tonight.” Obama “will make the opening argument in his campaign against a ‘do-nothing Congress,’” Romney said. “It’s shameful for a president to use the State of the Union to divide our nation.” Romney, Gingrich and former Sen. Rick Santorum are campaigning hard in Florida, a critical swing state that votes Jan. 31 in the state-by-state nominating process toward the November general election. Florida also is one of the hardest hit in the recession, with unemployment of 10 percent. The fourth remaining Republican in the race, Texas Rep. Ron Paul, is bypassing the state to conserve campaign cash. Both he and Santorum are nearly out of contention for the Republican nomination that has become a brutal political fight between Romney and Gingrich. Both Gingrich and Romney are fighting off negatives. Romney is trying to shed the impression that he is an out-of-touch plutocrat who is among the wealthiest 0.006 percent of Americans. Gingrich is saddled with past consulting work — critics insist he was a lobbyist — for the government-backed mortgage guarantor, Freddie Mac. Gingrich’s firm was paid $1.6 million over three years for work done on behalf of the mixed public-private organization, which many say was largely responsible for the collapse of the U.S. housing market the precipitated the near collapse of the American financial system in late 2008. Without mentioning any Republican by name, Obama used the annual presidential address to Congress to issue a populist challenge to shrink the gap between rich and poor, saying that ensuring a fair shot for all Americans is “the defining issue of our time.” He called for a new minimum tax rate of at least 30 percent on anyone making over $1 million. Many millionaires — including Romney — pay a rate less than that because they get most of their income from investments, which are taxed at a lower rate. “Now you can call this class warfare all you want,” Obama said, responding to a frequent criticism from the Republican presidential field. “But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.” The president’s timing could not have been better for a message about income inequality. Romney’s tax returns revealed that he earned nearly $22 million in 2010 and paid an effective tax rate of about 14 percent. His net worth has been estimated as high as $250 million. It remains unclear how the details of Romney’s wealth will play among American workers, who on average earn less in a lifetime than Romney paid in taxes in 2010 alone. Some estimates showed Romney, using the average of his 2010 and 2011 income, made more each day that the average U.S. household does in a year. As Romney relented to political pressure and released more than 500 pages of details from his federal tax returns — including a now-closed Swiss bank account — Gingrich kept up the heat, saying Romney was “outrageously dishonest” for accusing him of influence peddling while doing consulting work for Freddie Mac. “I don’t own any Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stock. He does, so presumably he was getting richer,” Gingrich said.
Surveys of Florida Republicans show Gingrich leading Romney after his decisive win in the South Carolina primary over the weekend, making Florida pivotal if Romney is to reassert his former role as the inevitable Republican nominee.
Surveys of Florida Republicans show Gingrich leading Romney after his decisive win in the South Carolina primary over the weekend, making Florida pivotal if Romney is to reassert his former role as the inevitable Republican nominee.