Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney made his presence known on Ohio State’s campus Saturday during President Barack Obama’s kickoff campaign, keeping his bus at the Fawcett Center throughout the rally.
Ryan Williams, a national spokesperson for Romney’s campaign, said the Romney bus had been parked at the Fawcett Center throughout the morning with student volunteers coming in and out campaigning for Romney and making phone calls during Obama’s efforts to rally Ohioans.
Romney will be appearing at Stamco Industries Co. in Euclid, Ohio, near Cleveland at 1:50 p.m. Monday. This marks his second recent appearance in Ohio as he stopped in Westerville at Otterbein University on April 27.
Williams said there were about 50 students who campaigned for Romney throughout the morning. Williams was one of about 14,000 that attended Obama’s “Ready To Go” Rally at the Schottenstein Center. Williams said he was not impressed with the turnout or the rally that kicked off Obama’s re-election campaigns.
“Voters know many of the president’s promises that he made are as empty as the several thousand empty seats in that arena,” Williams said.
Romney knows the importance of Ohio, Williams said, and he will be campaigning hard there.
“No Republican has not won Ohio who has gone to the presidency in many years,” Williams said. “It’s a state that we take very seriously and we’ll campaign in it vigorously.”
In a letter on Romney’s campaign site signed by the former Massachusetts governor himself, he discusses the issue of jobs and unemployment in Ohio.
“But you’ve now had three years to turn things around. The record of those three years is clear. Your policies have failed, not only in Ohio, but across the nation,” the letter states.
During his address, Obama first complimented Romney, saying he has raised a great family and worked well at a financial firm and running the state of Massachusetts.
“But I think he has drawn the wrong lessons from those experiences,” Obama said. “He sincerely believes that if CEOs and wealthy investors like him make money, the rest of us will automatically prosper as well.”
Tyler Byrum, a member of the OSU College Republicans and a second-year in engineering physics, told The Lantern that Obama has no right to criticize Romney as a millionaire.
“It was hypocritical for Obama to say those things because he himself is a millionaire,” Byrum said. “I just felt like what he addressed about Romney, it was all low-blow partisan bias.”
The president said Romney doesn’t understand that productivity does not necessarily equal income.
“He doesn’t seem to understand that maximizing profits by whatever means necessary, whether through layoffs or outsourcing or tax avoidance or union-busting, might not always be good for the average American or for the American economy,” Obama said.
Williams said Obama has a record of job loss and failing policies, so he used the same tactics that he relied on in his 2008 campaign.
“The speech the president gave was a cut-and-paste job and rehash of what he did in 2008. Except now the president has a record,” Williams said. “A record of higher taxes and job losses and exploding deficits.”
The national unemployment rate was 7.8 percent when Obama took office in January 2009 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In March, the official unemployment rate was at 8.2 percent. The national unemployment rate hit an all-time high in October 2009 at 10.0 percent.
