Mitt Romney Offers “Pre-Buttal” To Obama’s Cleveland Speech: “Words Are Cheap”

Mitt Romney recently delivered a “pre-buttal” speech to President Obama’s planned economic address in Cleveland on Thursday. In it, Romney surmised that Obama would speak “eloquently,” but said that his “words are cheap” and the voters will deny him a second term based on his track record with the economy, everyone’s favorite issue right now.

Obama is set to deliver what spokesman Jay Carney calls a “campaign speech” at Cuyahoga Community College Metropolitan Campus in Cleveland. Seeking to stay a step-ahead of the incumbent Obama, Romney tore the president’s speech apart before he gets the chance to deliver it.

“My own view is that he will speak eloquently, but that words are cheap, and that the record of an individual is the basis upon which you determine whether they should continue to hold on to their job,” said Romney to 100 executives at the Business Roundtable quarterly meeting in Washington. “We have 23 million Americans that are out of work, or stopped looking for work or underemployed. That is a compelling and sad statistic. These are real people.”

Romney also said that he expects Obama to do some more damage control on his earlier statement that the “private sector is doing fine.” Despite the fact that the president already took back these comments, Romney still points to the flub as an example of how out-of-touch Obama is.

“He said, as you know, just a few days ago that the private sector is doing fine, but the incredulity that came screaming back from the American people has caused him, I think, to rethink that,” Romney said. “You’re going to see him change course when he speaks tomorrow, where he will acknowledge that it isn’t going so well, and he’ll be asking for four more years.”

The Obama campaign’s response to Romney’s “pre-buttal” shows much of what’s become the Obama campaign line, though it avoids name-calling and mud-slinging. Reports CBS news:

“Contrary to Romney’s rhetoric, the president took our nation from losing 750,000 jobs a month to adding 4.3 million private sector jobs over the last 27 months, worked to reduce burdensome business regulations, and has put forward a plan to create more jobs and reduce the deficit while asking every American to pay their fair share. And while Mitt Romney promised to use his experience as a corporate buyout specialist to improve the economy, we know that he broke this promise in Massachusetts when he drove the state down to 47th out of 50 in job creation and left it with the largest per-capita debt of any state in the nation.”

In a separate statement, Obama campaign spokeswoman Lis Smith was much less tactful, saying that Romney merely slung “dishonest after dishonest claim about the President’s record and failed to offer any new ideas of his own on how to improve the economy and strengthen the middle class.”

Romney is sticking by big business. “Too often you find yourself facing a government that looks at you like you’re the bad guys,” Romney said. “And if you’re hiring people and employing people and paying taxes, you’re the good guys. I want you to do well.”

Do you think President Obama is out-of-touch? Or is it his GOP rival Romney who needs a reality check? Sound off below.