President Obama boarding Air Force One on Wednesday to fly to New Orleans, where he addressed the National Urban League.
NEW ORLEANS — Mitt Romney may have been gone — on his big foreign trip — but he was certainly not forgotten on Wednesday as the Obama campaign continued to take shots at the Republican candidate’s fitness to run the country.
President Obama, wrapping up a three-day fund-raising swing, used an appearance at the House of Blues here to criticize Mr. Romney’s business credentials and to hit back at critiques that the president does not understand how small businesses operate.
The Obama camp is eager to take advantage of Mr. Romney’s absence from the campaign trail — as he travels to Britain, Poland and Israel — to try to shore up the president’s own flagging poll numbers on his handling of the economy. Mr. Obama, during appearances this week on the West Coast and then in New Orleans, warned that a Republican victory in November would mean a return to the same economic policies that failed under President George W. Bush.
“You need to understand there are two fundamentally different visions of how we move forward,” Mr. Obama told a standing-room-only crowd of 500 people at the House of Blues as he appeared under a sign that said “Who Do You Love.”
The president renewed his attack on Mr. Romney’s experience at Bain Capital, deriding his résumé as heavy on work investing in “companies that have been called pioneers in outsourcing.” Mr. Obama added, “I don’t believe in outsourcing, I believe in in-sourcing.”
At the same time, the Obama campaign was rushing to use Mr. Romney’s overseas trip to put muscle behind its assertion that Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, has few specific foreign policy plans that differ from those of Mr. Obama, and no clue on how to go about leading America on the international stage.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. weighed in on Wednesday, sharply criticizing what he called a “feeble attempt by the Romney campaign to score political points” overseas. He was referring to an article in London’s Daily Telegraph — in which an unnamed Romney adviser suggests that because Mr. Romney is white he has more in common with Britain than Mr. Obama does.
“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser is quoted as telling the newspaper. “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”
Mr. Biden, in a statement that the Obama camp e-mailed to reporters, said the comments were “a disturbing start to a trip designed to demonstrate Governor Romney’s readiness to represent the United States on the world’s stage.” He called it “just another feeble attempt by the Romney campaign to score political points at the expense of this critical partnership.”
Furious Romney campaign aides lashed back.
“Today, the race for the highest office in our land was diminished to a sad level when the vice president of the United States used an anonymous and false quote from a foreign newspaper to prop up their flailing campaign,” a Romney spokesman, Ryan Williams, said in a statement. “The president’s own press secretary has repeatedly discredited anonymous sources, yet his political advisers saw fit to advance a falsehood.”
Obama aides were not backing down.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to New Orleans, Jennifer Psaki, a campaign spokeswoman, declined to characterize the remark as race-baiting, but said, “There are countless examples, which I’m happy to provide, of occasions where Mitt Romney and his surrogates have questioned whether the president understood America or freedom, and that really goes over a line that we think they shouldn’t.”
Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, called the remark “gratuitously ignorant of the facts.”
The race issue flared on the same day that Mr. Obama was speaking to the National Urban League here and announcing an education outreach for blacks.
The new White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African-Americans “aims to ensure that all African-American students can receive an education that fully prepares them for high school graduation, college completion and productive careers,” an administration official said.
