Believe In America

CORE MESSAGE

Nothing says "We believe in America" like offshoring jobs to China and stashing money in Swiss bank accounts.

Generated at quickmeme.com

Connect: We believe in America -- hard work, opportunity, and fairness.

Define: For Mitt Romney, nothing says "I believe in America" like offshoring jobs to China and stashing his millions in Swiss bank accounts.

Explain: That's how he made his fortune -- and that's just what we know based on what he hasn't hidden from the American people.

Expose: This is what we do know: as president, he'd wage more top-down class warfare that redistributes wealth from America's middle class to the already-rich.

Contrast: America needs leaders who don't just say they believe in America, but who fight to make sure the American Dream still means something for regular Americans who work hard and play by the rules.

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ATTACKS AND RESPONSES

ROMNEY: "My business experience will help me as president to fix our economy, create jobs and get things done in Washington."
RESPONSE:

• Keep in mind what a corporate takeover looks like in real life: CEOs lay off workers, cut their retirement and health care, and give themselves big bonuses.
• Americans need a president who fights for an economy that works for everyone. That means putting jobs ahead of maximizing profits for corporate executives and their wealthy investors.
• When Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he claimed his corporate experience would help him create jobs. It didn't. In fact, under Romney's governorship, Massachusetts dropped to 47th out of 50 states on job creation.
• Does Romney know how to make himself and his Wall Street donors very rich? Absolutely. How to offshore American jobs to China? Yup. Is he a voice for working families? No way.

ATTACK: "You built it!"
RESPONSE:

• We all built it! America was built by Americans -- individuals, businesses, and our government working together.
• The truth is that in America, no one succeeds on their own. Even Mitt Romney admits that "a lot of people help you in a business" -- the "people who provide roads, the fire, the police."
• Even the site of the Republican Convention itself -- publicly financed and owned -- exposes the truth that we all built America together.
• From Sher Valenzuela -- the speaker they picked to deliver the "We Built It" speech -- to Mitt Romney himself, the success of the Republican Convention's own speakers proves the President right -- we all built the America that made it possible.

ATTACK: "Government needs to get out of the way."
RESPONSE:

• With Hurricane Isaac bearing down, do the Republican Convention attendees really want the scientists monitoring the storms and the first responders standing by to get out of the way?
• It's time politicians stopped running for or against government and started running it well.
• Our government is just us -- nothing more and nothing less than Americans banding together to solve problems none of us can solve alone, like protecting our country and creating strong public schools for our kids.
• Leadership means knowing when to step back and when to step up to make sure the system works for people who work for a living. We need leaders who know the difference.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

• Mitt Romney amassed his huge personal fortune with the help of special tax loopholes used by the wealthiest of the wealthiest few -- like the foreign tax credit to offset the taxes he has paid to foreign countries, a Swiss bank account, and tax shelters in the Cayman Islands.
• Romney and Ryan's tax plan would raise taxes on the entire middle class while giving massive tax cuts to a tiny number of the already-rich -- conclusions confirmed by independent study after study.
• In the 2000s, big multinational corporations in the U.S. laid off nearly 3 million Americans while creating nearly 2.5 million jobs in foreign countries. But Romney's plan would let them get away with never paying any U.S. income taxes on their profits overseas -- resulting in 800,000 jobs created in other countries instead of America.
• Romney-Ryan's top-down class warfare would be Robin Hood in reverse, expected to produce the largest redistribution of income from the rest of us to the richest few in modern U.S. history.
• The Romney-Ryan budget would cost us up to 4 million jobs or more in the next two years alone.
• The Romney-Ryan budget would deeply cut our investments in our home front funding, including education by 20%, and let the child tax credit expire, pushing many children back into poverty.
• In fact, the Romney-Ryan budget puts America on the Path to Poverty -- throwing vulnerable kids off Medicaid, laying off teachers, and eventually ending all federal law enforcement, air traffic safety, and protection of our food and water.

We develop messaging by aggregating, analyzing and distilling polling, tested messaging, and expert recommendations, and monitoring the media to identify what is and isn't working. See here for some of the experts and organizations we draw on.