Obama Shifts Attention to Romney's Time as Governor

Team Obama is continuing to hammer away at Mitt Romney's professional past.

Fresh off its last attack on the presumptive GOP nominee's time at Bain Capital, the president's reelection campaign opened up a new front on Thursday with an online ad that accuses Romney of failing to keep his promises as the governor of Massachusetts.

State Democrat after state Democrat take their turn bashing Romney’s record in the four-minute film. Among their claims: By the end of his term, Massachusetts had finished 47th in the nation in job creation and had $2.6 billion in debt; and that Romney reneged on his promise to lower taxes by imposing new fees—i.e. taxes—that mostly affected the middle class.

"There are times when I watch Mitt Romney say the exact same things now that he said in Massachusetts in 2002, in a robotic way that is completely hollow," says Carl Sciortino, one of the Democratic state representatives in the ad. "It didn't work here, so I'm not quite sure why he thinks it would work nationally."

The Hill points out that the Obama team appears to be taking a page out of the Romney campaign's playbook, which often focuses on what it calls the "broken promises" of the president's first term.

The ad is also noteworthy because it could force Romney to talk more about his time in the governor's mansion, a topic that he has largely avoided on the stump in favor of touting his business credentials. One reason for that, of course, is that any discussion of Romney's time as governor will likely bring with it attention to the Obamacare-like state healthcare reforms that he signed into law.

Here's the ad: