During a speech to a crowd at Morningside College in Sioux City this morning, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney suggested President Obama should quit “campaigning” and “blaming” and go back to work in Washington. In addition, Romney said he likes “capitalism and free enterprise” but Romney seemed to stake a cautionary note on the issue of regulatory reform.
“We have the president right now campaigning, I think he’s in — where is it? — North Carolina today and he’s campaigning for his stimulus. Someone needs to tell him the stimulus is dead, gone, disappeared, invisible. The emperor has no clothes,” Romney said. “That bill of his, the stimulus bill, was turned down by the Democrats. His own leaders in the Democratic Party in the Senate have said, ‘No, that bill isn’t going forward.’ I don’t know what he’s campaigning about. What he needs to do is stop campaigning and stop blaming and go back to Washington and sit down with Democrats and Republicans and work on legislation that will get America working again.”
The crowd applauded.
“Leadership is hard,” Romney continued. “Reaching across the aisle with people who disagree with you on issues and finding common ground — that’s tough. He hasn’t been able to do those things. He likes campaigning, so that’s what he’s doing, but we didn’t elect him to campaign. We elected him to lead and we need that leadership.”
Romney, who told the crowd he likes capitalism and free enterprise, had this advice about over-zealous regulatory reform efforts.: “By the way, as Republicans we’ve got to make sure that we don’t pretend like we just want to get rid of all regulation. You need regulation to make free markets work, but the regulation needs to be modern and up-to-date, streamlined and the regulators need to be encouraging the private sector, not trying to kill it and right now, our regulatory burden is killing jobs in America and this president has added more regulation, I think by a factor of four times, than the prior president on an annual basis.”
Romney spoke for about 10 minutes, then opened it up for questions from the crowd. A post on that later.
About O.Kay Henderson
Kay is a founding member of the Radio Iowa network newsroom. In 1994, she became the network’s news director. She’s a featured reporter and commentator on Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press,” and the 2002 recipient of the Shelley Award.
[…] At Sioux City, IA event, Bay Stater ignores GOP rivals in stump speech that hits Obama's bus tour and over-regulation. […]