Mitt Romney, the presumptive frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination next year, made his speech at the Faith and Freedom Conference Friday night all about jobs.
Romney was one of the few speakers to mention Friday’s jobs report, and he wielded it like a cleaver to attack President Obama before a rapt audience in downtown DC.
“Hear what he said today?” Romney asked the crowd. He criticized Obama for calling the unexpectedly high jobless numbers “bumps on the road to recovery” in an Ohio speech earlier in the day.
“No, Mr. President, that’s not a bump,” Romney said. “That’s Americans.”
Romney called the continuing unemployment rate “a moral crisis that we face in this country,” that he says Obama has ignored.
“I don’t see it’s possible to solve a crisis, if you can’t see a crisis,” Romney said.
By way of solutions, Romney turned to his stump speech: cut government spending (he spoke again of capping the size of government to 20% of GDP), eliminating regulation and repealing what Romney called “the mother of all federal powergrabs…Obamacare.”
Romney’s speech was one of the most economically-focused at the FFC’s first day. But the former governor of Massachusetts had a bone to throw the socially-conservative audience at the start of his remarks.
“We’re united in our belief in the sanctity of human life,” Romney, who used to be pro-choice, said. “And we’re united in our belief in the importance and the significance of marriage between one man and one woman.”
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