Mitt Romney formally accepted the Republican Party’s presidential nomination on Thursday night. In his address to the party’s convention in Tampa, Florida, he promised to restore America’s promise and utilize his experience in business to help create up to twelve million jobs.
“What is needed in our country today is not complicated or profound,” the former Massachusetts governor said after touting his success at Bain Capital, an investment firm he founded in 1984. “I learned the real lessons about how America works from experience,” he said, unlike President Barack Obama who never worked in the private sector before seeking elected office.
“Jobs to him are about government,” said Romney of his opponent. But “it doesn’t take a special government commission to tell us what America needs. What America needs is jobs. Lots of jobs.”
More than twenty million Americans are out of work. The unemployment rate stands at 8.2 percent, virtually the same as when Obama took office in January 2009.
To boost the economy, Romney promised to increase domestic energy production, improve school choice, enact free-trade agreements, reduce the deficit as well as taxes and lift regulations on businesses.
It’s the genius of the American free enterprise system to harness the extraordinary creativity and talent and industry of the American people with a system that is dedicated to creating tomorrow’s prosperity rather than trying to redistribute today’s.
Without referring to the television commercials from the president’s reelection campaign and pro-Obama groups that have attacked Romney’s business record, portraying him as a callous plutocrat who has no regard for ordinary, working people, Romney lamented that Barack Obama’s promises had given way “to disappointments and division. This isn’t something we have to accept.”
Hope and change had a powerful appeal. But tonight I’d ask a simple question: If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn’t you feel that way now that he’s President Obama?
He added, without directly referring to his enormous wealth which appears to have put some voters off, “In America we celebrate success, we don’t apologize for success.”
The choice in November, said Republican senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who introduced Mitt Romney, is “about what kind of country we want America to be.”
Romney added, “To the majority of Americans who now believe that the future will not be better than the past, I can guarantee you this: if Barack Obama is reelected, you will be right.”
Although the president’s approval rating stands at 44 percent in Gallup’s latest poll with 47 percent of American disapproving, Obama and Romney are neck in neck both nationwide and in crucial swing states like Florida, Ohio and Virginia which will likely determine the outcome of the election in two months’ time.