PRESS RELEASE from Mitt Romney
for President
FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
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CONTACT: Romney Press Office
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November 22, 2011
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MITT ROMNEY TO
PRESIDENT OBAMA: “WELCOME TO NEW HAMPSHIRE -- YOUR POLICIES HAVE FAILED”
Boston, MA – Mitt Romney penned an open letter to President
Obama in advance of his campaign stop today in Manchester. The
following letter will run as a full page advertisement in the
Union Leader,
Concord Monitor, and
The [Nashua]
Telegraph:
Dear President Obama,
Welcome to New Hampshire.
I
hope you enjoy your visit. In 49 days, voters here will be going to the
polls to choose a Republican nominee to run against you. I would like
to lay out for you some of what I will be saying on the campaign trail
if I am fortunate enough to become my party’s candidate.
I
would begin by acknowledging that you were dealt a hard hand. You came
into office in the midst of an economic crisis that was not of your
making. You were asked to face great challenges and to solve difficult
problems. The tasks before you would have taxed the abilities of any
new president.
But we now have had three years to watch your policies unfold and to
assess their results. The evidence is in and
it is unequivocal. I will be blunt. Your policies have failed. It is
bad enough that they have fallen short even by the standards your own
administration set for itself. But things are much worse than that. Far
from bringing the crisis to an end, your policies have actively
hindered economic recovery. In some cases, they were the exact opposite
of what our government should have been doing.
You and
your advisors sold your economic “stimulus” package to Congress on the
basis of a forecast that it would hold unemployment below 8 percent.
There is a reason why this projection was wildly off base and that
unemployment soared above 10 percent and is now stuck around 9 percent.
Your stimulus bill was filled with special interest giveaways, and
eased the way for your administration to shovel loan guarantees out the
door to politically connected “green” technology firms, some of which
are now in bankruptcy, with the taxpayers on the hook for more than
$500 million.
Even
where crony capitalism did not get in the way, so many projects were
far from “shovel ready” or had absolutely nothing to do with creating
jobs. Nearly a trillion dollars of tax dollars was spent, our budget
deficit exploded, and some 25 million
Americans remain either unemployed, underemployed, or have given up
seeking work altogether. You placed a burden of debt on America that
will take generations to repay and we got almost nothing in return.
You
also failed to grasp the impact of your policies on the American
business climate. Investment depends upon a degree of certainty, but
your administration made it impossible for enterprises to make accurate
forecasts about their future costs. If companies have stopped hiring in
America, it is in no small part because of policies, including
Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and an astonishing
tangle of new federal regulations that have snuffed out investment. If
we are ever to get America back to work, they all must be repealed.
I will also be talking about how you have catered to favored special
interests, like civil-service unions and
environmentalists, at the expense of American workers. Take your
decision to “delay” building the state-of-the-art Keystone XL oil
pipeline. Some 20,000 American jobs are at stake. You may not regard
that as a large number, but every one of the unemployed men and women
whose future you have sacrificed to satisfy your political base in the
environmentalist left deserve far better. And this is but one of many
examples I can cite.
America deserves better.
It is not America’s laziness that is the problem, as you recently
suggested. It is your policies.
So
once again, Mr. President, welcome to New Hampshire. We need a great
debate about how best to get our country working again. We can’t afford
four more years of failure. I believe in unleashing America’s
potential. That is what my own campaign for the presidency is all
about.
Sincerely,