President Obama’s campaign fundraiser speeches and his rhetoric at official White House events have converged.
The president specifically attacked Mitt Romney and the Paul Ryan budget at the campaign event. “The budget was marvelous,” Obama quoted Romney as saying, according to the pool report. “When you go through this budget, the vision is an American where everyone is fending for themselves, a few are doing well at the top and most people are struggling to get by,” the president added, according to the pooler.
Obama previously mocked Romney for using the word “marvelous” at in his Associated Press luncheon. He lifted another line from his AP speech tonight, telling campaign donors that “we tried what they are peddling and it did not work,” just as he told the crowd of reporters earlier this week that Republicans were still “peddling” trickle-down economics.
The president even detailed the litany of spending cuts he dislikes in the Ryan budget. “He cited things in the budget – education, science research, early childhood education, caring for our environment, looking after our veterans, keeping up with our infrastructure, food safety – that he said were ‘shrunk to the point of near invisibility,'” according to pool.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney denied, earlier this week, that Obama was being political in his speech at the AP luncheon, which Carney described as a “wonky . . . policy speech.”
That “wonky policy speech” has already become an attack video. Now, it’s a fundraising pitch, too.
