DETROIT — Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Friday unveiled his plan to cut taxes, reduce the size of government and reform entitlement spending, promising a crowd of more than 1,000 that he would get the economy back on track through conservative, pro-growth policies that would require everyone to sacrifice.
Romney’s major policy address, staged at Ford Field, was an outline of how the former Massachusetts governor would slash individual tax rates by 20 percent, reduce spending by hundreds of billions of dollars and cut the cost of Medicare and Social Security by raising the eligibility age and shrinking benefits for those who are wealthy.
Romney pledged to cut federal spending by 20 percent by the end of his first term, “without sacrificing military superiority.”
Among the programs Romney would oust from the federal subsidy list are Amtrak and Planned Parenthood. Romney said he would also give states total control over programs now run mainly by the federal government, including Medicaid and food stamps, and pledged to shrink the federal workforce by 10 percent through attrition.
“Taken together my plan is the biggest fundamental change in the federal government in modern history,” Romney said.
Romney delivered his speech as new polling shows him pulling into a solid lead over his top opponent, Rick Santorum.
A Rasmussen Reports survey released Friday showed Romney leading Santorum, 40 percent to 34 percent, though earlier polls gave Santorum an edge.
The Romney camp no doubt is hoping for an additional boost from Friday’s speech. But the event was somewhat overshadowed by a few factors, some of them outside of his control, like the mix of rain and snow that overtook the area in the early morning hours, and a crowd of union auto workers who staged a nearby demonstration highlighting Romney’s opposition to the $25 billion federal bailout of the auto industry.
But his own campaign team may have caused the most significant distraction to Romney’s big speech by staging it in the massive stadium, which is home to the Detroit Lions and seats 65,000 people.
While the 1,200 or so people who came to hear the speech were corralled into an area on one side of the playing field, the television cameras caught thousands of empty, bright blue seats.
The move to the stadium resulted from a last-minute effort to accommodate a crowd that quickly sold out a smaller venue in recent days. Officials with the Detroit Economic Club, which sponsored the event, said tickets sold out in 90 minutes at a nearby hotel that could accommodate just 700 people.
Despite the explanation, Democratic operatives quickly seized on the image of the Romney crowd dwarfed by the massive stadium. They released a blast email to reporters that juxtaposed the empty stadium seats at Ford Field with the nearly full XL Convention Center in Hartford for a rally by then-candidate Barack Obama held four years ago.
Romney’s campaign tried to make the event look as full as possible,” a Democratic National Committee statement said, “but largely failed.”
