Obama, Romney exchange tirades over US vote

OWA: Mitt Romney complained that Barack Obama’s re- election bid was steeped in “hatred” while the president said that his Republican foe would strip the elderly of state health benefits.

Romney, hoping to turn the Democrat out of the White House after a single term, said that Obama and backers were stoking divides based on income, age and ethnicity, to whip up a sense of “enmity and jealousy and anger.”

“The president’s campaign is all about division and attack and hatred,” Mitt Romney told CBS News. “My campaign is about getting America back to work and creating greater unity in this country.”

“The president seems to be running just to hang onto power—I think he’ll do anything in his power to try to get reelected,” he said.

Obama denied running a divisive campaign, but admitted that controversial remarks by Vice President Joe Biden—who told a crowd in the former slave-owning state of Virginia on Tuesday that Republican banking policies would “put y’all back in chains”—had been a “distraction.”

“What Joe Biden was talking about, again, is an example of a substantive argument, a substantive issue that the American people should be concerned about,” Obama told the “Entertainment Tonight” program.

Romney had earlier characterized Biden’s remarks as “one more example of a divisive effort to keep from talking about the real issues.”

The Obama campaign responded to Romney’s outburst by implicitly questioning whether the Republican’s temperament was suited for the Oval Office.

“Governor Romney’s comments . . . seemed unhinged and particularly strange coming at a time when he’s pouring tens of millions of dollars into negative ads that are demonstrably false,” Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said.

The president, wrapping up a threeday bus tour of Iowa, declined to wage a tit- for- tat battle, as he tapped the political firepower of his popular wife Michelle.

Obama also opened a new assault on Romney on health care for the elderly, taking aim at his Republican running mate Paul Ryan, who backs a voucher plan for patients to buy private health insurance.

“I think they know their plan’s not very popular. You can tell that because they are being pretty dishonest about my plan,” Obama told a 3,000- strong crowd, which included many seniors, in front of a red brick brewery here.

Romney had earlier accused Obama of pulling $700 million from Medicare to pay for his landmark health reform, which Republicans oppose. Obama in turn accused his rival of throwing “everything at the wall to see if it sticks.”

“I have strengthened Medicare. I have made reforms that have saved millions of seniors with Medicare hundreds of dollars on their prescription drugs,” Obama said.

“Mr. Romney and his running mate have a very different plan. They want to turn Medicare into a voucher program,” he said, warning that such vouchers would not keep up with fast- rising health care costs.

The row over Medicare, a popular federal government program, could be pivotal in electoral battlegrounds with substantial populations of retirees, including Florida, the largest US swing state. AFP