Romney’s Top Six ‘I Know I Am But So Are You’ Moments

Romney’s Top Six ‘I Know I Am But So Are You’ Moments

By Annie-Rose Strasser

Jul 10, 2012

Mitt Romney has a way of deflecting criticism that is uniquely his. Where most politicians tend to pivot to another topic if they don’t like what someone is accusing them of, Romney takes an I’m-rubber-you’re-glue approach to attacks, accepting them as true but then simultaneously making the same accusation of his opponent.

Just today, the Romney campaign has started reflecting back allegations of outsourcing by saying that, in fact, President Obama was the one who really outsourced jobs. This is just the latest maneuver of the sort. Here are the top six times that Romney has had a “I Know I Am But So Are You” moment:

1. Mitt Romney “offshores” jobs, but Obama outsources. When the Washington Post ran a huge story on how Mitt Romney sent jobs overseas during his time at Bain Capital, the Romney campaign rushed to specify that he had “offshored” jobs, not “outsourced” them. But now the campaign is saying that it was in fact Obama who outsourced jobs because the Recovery Act funding US-based renewable energy projects by companies that also did work overseas. Those claims have been debunked previously as patently untrue.

2. Romneycare’s individual mandate is constitutional, but Obamacare’s isn’t. Mitt Romney’s spokespeople have argued that the individual mandate is an “unconstitutional penalty.” Romney called it a constitutional tax. But whatever it’s called, he wants to be clear that Obama is raising taxes and Romney, when he passed a nearly identical bill in Massachusetts, was not. (He did, however, briefly say it was a tax then too)

3. Mitt Romney got two degrees from Harvard, but Obama “spent too much time” there. Mitt Romney got two degrees — a JD and MBA — at Harvard; President Obama got one degree there. But Romney told his audience at a rally earlier this year that President Obama “spent too much time at Harvard.” This argument tries to frame Obama as the out-of-touch elite, despite the fact that Romney is the millionaire son of a governor.

4. Romney wants to gut Medicare, but says Obama is responsible for massive Medicare cuts. He has said that President Obama wants to “end Medicare as we know it.” But Romney’s budget proposal includes the same cuts to Medicare and drastically alters the program. He would convert the current system into a voucher-based “premiums support” system.

5. Romney calls Obama’s logic on job creation “silly,” but uses the same logic himself. In 2006, when job creation was incredibly slow in Massachusetts under a Romney governorship, he asked constituents to understand how hard it is to pull a state out of a deep recession. When Obama uses the same logic to explain slow job creation in the wake of the worst recession since the great depression, Romney calls his reasoning “silly."

6. Mitt Romney’s big houses are a sign of success, John Kerry’s big house shows he’s rich and out of touch. In 2004, when Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) was the Democratic candidate for President, Romney went on the attack, joking that he didn’t know why Kerry would want to be president since “he would have to move into a smaller house.”