Obama slams GOP plans at Tampa campaign stop

By WILLIAM MARCH | The Tampa Tribune
Published: June 22, 2012 Updated: June 22, 2012 - 8:58 PM

TAMPA --

In two Florida speeches Friday, President Barack Obama blasted political gridlock, telling supporters in Tampa that it's preventing revival of the U.S. middle class and Latino leaders in Orlando that it's blocking reform of the immigration system.

In Tampa, Obama hit hard on his campaign theme of economic inequality. He said the nation's middle class has suffered economic erosion for a decade ? a problem he called even more damaging than the short-term economic crisis.

"In America, prosperity has never come from the top down ? it comes from a strong and growing middle class, and all those people who are striving and working to get into the middle class," he said.

"We don't need more top-down economics.? What we need is some middle class-out economics, some bottom-up economics."

In Orlando, using nearly identical language, Obama said politics is preventing adoption of a just and humane immigration reform plan ? his answer to critics who say he has failed to keep his 2008 campaign promise to make reform his top priority.

"The problem is not the lack of technical solutions. We know what the solutions are," he said. But Republicans who once wrote or backed reform bills "have been driven away from the table by a small faction of their own party."

Obama cited the failure of the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform backed by former President George W. Bush but decried as "amnesty" by the tea party movement, and the failure of the bipartisan DREAM Act, which would establish a path to citizenship for children brought here by illegal immigrant parents.

Republicans blocked the DREAM Act even though it was written by lawmakers in both parties, he said.

"When it came up for a vote ? the bill hadn't changed. The need hadn't changed. The only thing that had changed was politics."

Obama pressed home his advantage with Latino voters by hammering at the hard-line stances on illegal immigration taken by his opponent, Mitt Romney, during the Republican primary.

Obama's speech followed Romney's appearance Thursday before the same group, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, or NALEO.

In Romney's speech, he played down the hard-line immigration stances he took during the primary campaign, in which he campaigned with the author of Arizona's controversial anti-immigration law, advocated a stronger border fence and English as the official language, and accused opponents including Newt Gingrich of favoring amnesty.

Obama reminded the crowd of Romney's previously harder line.

"He said that when he makes a promise to you, he'll keep it," Obama said. "Well, he has promised to veto the DREAM Act, and we should take him at his word."

Obama last week enacted parts of the DREAM Act by executive order, allowing college-bound students brought here by illegal immigrant parents to apply for temporary visas.

He said he could no longer wait for the law to pass and compared those who will be helped to his own children.

"When I meet these young people, all throughout communities, I see myself. ? I see my daughters and my nieces and my nephews. Who knows what they might achieve if we just give them a chance?"

In Orlando, Obama was backed by two of his prominent Hispanic appointees, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and El Salvador Ambassador Mari Carmen Aponte, a Puerto Rican.

Aponte's confirmation, initially blocked by Senate Republicans including Florida's Marco Rubio, became a hot issue among Florida's rapidly growing Puerto Rican community.

In Tampa, Obama was introduced by Mayor Bob Buckhorn, a Democrat whose office is non-partisan but who has actively supported Obama even while readying the city for the Republican National Convention in August.

He praised Obama for investing in the nation's infrastructure, pointing to the $500 million Interstate 4 connector, a product of the administration's economic stimulus bill, and the Riverwalk project, about to be completed with a federal grant.

"This president has stood up for mayors, and by standing up for mayors he has stood up for the people in their communities," he said.

Obama's social equality campaign theme has been called risky by some and drawn criticism as "socialism" from his opponents.

But he's hardly backing away from it.

"This isn't just one of the run-of-the-mill political arguments you hear about in Washington sometimes," he told the crowd of more than 2,500 at the Hillsborough Community College Dale Mabry campus. "This is the defining issue of our time.? We're in a make-or-break moment for the middle class."

Romney's economic proposals, he said, would create "another $250,000 tax cut for the average millionaire," but middle-class families would have to pay for it through reductions in tax deductions and federal education spending and conversion of Medicare to a voucher program.

"When Mr. Romney tells us he's some sort of financial wizard who can fix our economy, that's how he intends to do it," Obama said. "It's nothing more than the same thing we tried during the last administration, except on steroids."

Obama got a boost from a Washington Post story Friday saying the private equity firm founded and run by Romney, Bain Capital, had invested heavily in companies that specialized in outsourcing jobs.

Obama has already criticized Romney and Bain for taking over companies, loading them with debt to pay Bain's management fees, then forcing them into bankruptcy and layoffs.

He pounced on the Post story.

"Today it was reported in The Washington Post that the companies his firm owned were 'pioneers' in the outsourcing of American jobs to places like China and India," Obama said.

"Pioneers! Let me tell you, Tampa, we do not need an outsourcing pioneer in the Oval Office."

The Romney campaign sent press spokesman Ryan Williams to the HCC appearance to respond.

Williams said Obama was using "false and discredited attacks to distract from his failed economic policies and abysmal jobs record ? the worst economic record of any president in modern history," and is "desperate to distract from his shameful legacy."

Romney, he said, "has a proven record of job creation in the private sector."

Before the Tampa speech, Obama appeared at a $20,000-per-person fundraiser at the campus with about 25 attendees, according to White House press pool reports.

He'll be back in Florida next week for campaign events in Miami.

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