Bill Clinton described Romney has having a “sterling business record” and being qualified to president. On the Bain attack, he said: "I don't think that we ought to get into the position where we say 'This is bad work. This is good work.” And: "I think the real issue ought to be, what has Governor Romney advocated in the campaign that he will do as president? What has President Obama done and what does he propose to do? How do these things stack up against each other?"
But, he added: "There is a lot of controversy about that. But if you go in and you try to save a failing company, and you and I have friends here who invest in companies, you can invest in a company, run up the debt, loot it, sell all the assets, and force all the people to lose their retirement and fire them. … Or you can go into a company, have cutbacks, try to make it more productive with the purpose of saving it. And when you try, like anything else you try, you don't always succeed."
“The formula is getting familiar: find a line of attack against Mitt Romney, find clips of his GOP primary opponents delivering variations on that line of attack, create a montage, repeat,” Politico writes. “This morning, Democrats put that method to use in a web video targeting Mitt Romney's record in Massachusetts, highlighting criticism from Republicans on job creation and taxes. Special guests include Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman. But the real stars are John McCain and Rick Perry, who says in a debate video from earlier this cycle: ‘You failed as the governor of Massachusetts.’”
“First lady Michelle Obama will return to Virginia next week to campaign for her husband,” the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports. “Her scheduled June 7 appearance in Northern Virginia will be her first public campaign event of the 2012 cycle without President Barack Obama, according to the Obama campaign.”
No. 1 geopolitical foe? Bloomberg: “U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected Russia’s claim that it’s a stabilizing influence on Syria and said that, by protecting the Assad regime, it’s speeding the country’s slide into civil war.”
Clinton said, “The Russians keep telling us they want to do everything they can to avoid a civil war because they believe that the violence would be catastrophic,” Clinton said in remarks to students in Denmark yesterday. Noting Russia’s claims to be a stabilizing influence, Clinton said, “I reject that. I think they are, in effect, propping up the regime at a time when we should be working on a political transition.”
Obama today heads to Minneapolis and Chicago for White House and campaign events. In Minneapolis, he’ll push the Veterans Jobs Corps initiative and urge Congress to create it. “ ‘The proposal would "help Afghanistan and Iraq veterans get jobs as cops and firefighters, as well as other jobs serving their communities,’ said the White House schedule,” per USA Today.
