Business Savvy?

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CORE MESSAGE

What's good for working families is good for business. Insulting 47% of your clients isn't.

Connect: When Obama took office, our economy was in free fall. We've got a lot more to do, but we're steadily putting people back to work.

Define: We need a president who understands that what's good for working families is good for business. Mitt Romney doesn't get it, and it shows.

Illustrate: If Romney had been in charge, our automakers would've been forced out of business, laying off a million Americans. If he takes over, the middle class will pay more so the rich pay less.

Discredit: This is what Romney calls "big change" and a "turnaround": doubling down on the trickle down that got us the slowest job growth since the Great Depression and letting Wall Street repeat the mistakes that got us the Great Recession.

Remind: It's what he knows: how to make millions for Wall Street, not jobs for America. Don't forget that his corporate experience is in buying up businesses that others built and sending American jobs overseas.

Contrast: The real job creators are regular people who keep our businesses thriving and hiring. Main street businesses know that what's good for the middle class is good for business -- and that you don't stay in business by insulting 47% of your clients.

ATTACKS AND RESPONSES

ROMNEY: "I'm promising big change."
RESPONSE:

• Here's Mitt Romney, using his corporate experience to dress up the same policies that failed our country and crashed our economy as "big change." 
• Together, we've battled back from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the American auto industry is back, the war in Iraq is over, and bin Laden is dead. Our economy is on track and over 5 million Americans are back at work.
• No doubt we've got more to do, but if we switch to Romney now, the "big change" he'd like to ram through Congress puts our hard-won progress at risk -- along with the foundations of middle class security like Medicare and education.
• And he's doing it just so he can give the rich like himself more tax cuts.

ATTACK: "We don't need a secretary of business to understand business -- we need a president who understands business, and I do."
RESPONSE:

• We need a president who understands the job of being president. That means governing so that individuals, businesses, and our government work together to produce prosperity for the country.
• For a guy running on his corporate experience, Romney should know that business leaders strongly support the President's proposal to organize the business agencies so they work together more efficiently.
• We need a president who understands that what's good for working families is good for business. Romney's experience is in maximizing profits for corporate executives and their wealthy investors at the expense of jobs. And it's how he'd govern, too.
• Let's remember that when Romney ran for governor, he made the same promise -- that 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.

FALSEHOOD: "The jobs data is politically manipulated."
RESPONSE:

• Crying foul over good jobs data may score political points, but it's rooting against America -- and puts our economy at risk.
• That's because it's impossible for the Bureau of Labor Statistics to politically manipulate the data with all the safeguards in place. Investors count on it because they know the jobs report moves markets.
• No one who claims to be pro-business should ever cast doubt on the Bureau's completely non-political number-crunching, but that's what Mitt Romney's allies are doing just to get him elected.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

• Under President Obama, the American people created jobs for 32 straight months -- despite Republicans in Congress who've put political gain ahead of putting people back to work.
• Romney's economic plans will result in massive layoffs of our teachers, firefighters, and cops, as well as all the private sector jobs generated by their economic activity -- risking another recession.
• Romney has a $5 trillion tax plan favoring the wealthy that's paid for by raising taxes on the entire middle class -- including nearly 30 million Americans with business income.
• On the other hand, President Obama has signed 18 tax cuts for small businesses into law and has cut taxes for middle-class families every year he has been in office, by an average of $3,600 over the past four years.
• So Romney is doubling down on trickle down, which led to the worst job growth since the Great Depression but did make the richest few even richer. We tried it their way and it didn't work.
• On the auto rescue, Romney was wrong and would've made the call that forced America's automakers out of business. President Obama made the right call to use government funds to save the auto industry and more than a million jobs.
• Romney often brags about his corporate experience as well as his work on the 2002 Olympics, but he actually got $1.5 billion from the federal government during his Olympics job and millions of federal bailout dollars  for wealthy investors in his corporate job.
  

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.