Romney Compares Obama to Marie Antoinette
Meanwhile, his son tries out Obama birther reference in New Hampshire, then apologizes.
| Posted Friday, Dec. 30, 2011, at 3:25 PM
Photo by Pierre Verdy/AFP/Getty Images.
Barack Obama has been compared to a lot of people, but this is a new one, at least on the campaign trail.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, back on top in the latest national polls, compared the president to Marie Antoinette while campaigning in Iowa on Friday, the Los Angeles Times reports.
“He’s in Hawaii right now. We’re in the cold, in the rain, in the wind because we care about America,” Romney said, according to the LAT. “He just finished his 90th round of golf. We have 25 million Americans who are out of work, stopped looking for work or are underemployed. Home values have come down. The median income in America in the last four years has dropped by 10 percent.”
He added, “The other day President Obama said, you know, it could be worse,” Romney said. "Sounds like Marie Antoinette, 'Let them eat cake.'"
Never mind that Marie Antoinette probably didn't actually say that, or that Romney himself owns enough fancy houses to fill a slideshow. The jab comes across as another attempt to paint Obama as out-of-touch, effete, and, yes, foreign. Think Romney's above that? Well, his son clearly isn't.
Matt Romney, on the trail in New Hampshire on his father's behalf, attempted an Obama birther joke in response to a question about whether his father would release his tax returns. "He's certainly not afraid of anything, not hiding anything," Matt Romney said. "You know, I heard someone suggest the other day that as soon as Obama releases his grades and birth certificate and sort of a long list of things then maybe he'd do it."
Sensing trouble, Matt's brother Tagg jumped in, saying, "That was not my dad that said that." Matt Romney followed up with a tweet, writing, "I repeated a dumb joke. My bad."
Patch.com's Concord, N.H. site has video of the remarks. Meanwhile, Politico reports that the Obama campaign has already pounced on the birther reference, sending an email that read, in part: "This is how the Romney campaign thinks it's going to win the Republican primary: by pandering to the dead-ender fringe of extremists who still question where the President was born."
