Obama Ad Targets Mitt Romney’s ’47 Percent’ Comments

Barack Obama is hitting Mitt Romney over the GOP candidate’s comments in a recently released secret fundraiser video, putting out a political ad saying that Romney needs to stop attacking others on taxes and come clean about his own record.

The ad is a signal that Obama’s team doesn’t want voters to forget that Romney apparently isn’t concerned with the “47 percent of Americans” who pay no income tax, a group he said was dependent on the government. The ad also shows that Obama doesn’t plan to let up on Romney about his taxes, The Huffington Post noted.

The campaign will start running the ad, the first using Romney’s fundraiser comments, on Monday in Ohio. Romney plans to campaign there this week.

As The Huffington Post describes, the ad strikes Romney hard on his comments:

The 30-second ad opens with a video of Romney at a private fundraiser in May, where he told donors that 47 percent of Americans don’t pay income taxes, believe they are victims, and feel entitled to government assistance.

“My job is not to worry about those people,” Romney says in the video, which was taped without his knowledge.

A narrator in the Obama ad responds, “Isn’t it the president’s job to worry about everyone?”

The ad then goes on to talk about Romney’s own tax records, disclosed Friday.

The records showed Romney paid an effective tax rate of 14.1 percent in 2011, a rate lower than millions of middle-income Americans. But as Business Week points out, Romney purposely withheld some deductions for charitable contributions that would have put him at a rate below 13 percent, an attempt to keep to his vow that he has never paid below that rate.

You can check out Obama’s ad against Mitt Romney’s 47 percent comment here:

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