Senior campaign adviser David Axelrod (center) met with House and Senate Democrats on Tuesday to discuss President Barack Obama’s re-election, his tax plans and his nine-state campaign strategy.
“At this point, I think it would be very smart for the United States Congress to take a step on what we can all agree to,” she added, echoing the president’s message from Monday.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) said he would schedule a vote on the president’s plan, even though it — like Republicans’ demands for more votes to repeal the health care law — is sure to go nowhere.
Reid, along with other Democrats after the confab with the White House envoys, repeatedly noted that all taxpayers would get a cut on the first $250,000 they make.
Republicans, he said, are “holding tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans hostage in order to exact even bigger tax giveaways to the top 2 percent.”
And he came out of the meeting spitting fire at presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
“Romney doesn’t need additional tax breaks. In fact, the U.S. tax code is probably an afterthought for him, given how much money he obviously has placed in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Bermuda,” Reid ripped.
The Majority Leader said he always admired Romney’s father, the late Michigan Gov. George Romney, and said his son should follow in his footsteps and release his tax returns.
Reid acknowledged there may not be unanimity among Democrats on the $250,000 threshold, but that doesn’t mean they’ll vote against it.
Obama, meanwhile, will reinforce the message at a meeting with Democratic leaders at the White House on Wednesday afternoon to discuss his tax proposals and the rest of the legislative agenda.
The meetings come as Democrats try to present a united front four months before the elections.
In the hour-and-a-half House Democratic meeting, Axelrod was joined by Obama senior adviser Broderick Johnson and the president’s director of opinion research, David Simas.
The group spoke about the president’s re-election strategy, which focuses on winning Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The campaign is spending some $24 million in those states this month on ads targeting Romney, and the group played some of those ads during the meeting.
“They absolutely reminded us of the achievements of this administration,” Rep. Robert Andrews (N.J.) said after the meeting. “They also educated us about some things about Mitt Romney’s record that I frankly didn’t know.”
He noted that the Obama advisers told the Caucus that while Romney was governor of Massachusetts, the state ranked first in state debt and 47th in job creation out of all 50 states.
The meeting came the same day Karl Rove’s super PAC, Crossroads GPS, debuted a $25 million anti-Obama ad blitz across nine states, including some of the same states the president’s campaign is targeting.
Caucus Vice Chairman Xavier Becerra said Obama’s advisers also gave a presentation about jobs and the economy and combating attacks from Republicans.
“The president’s team focused on moving the country forward, talked about all the things that have been done to take us from this economic abyss that we found ourselves in to the point where now, after 28 consecutive months of job growth, we see over 4.5 million Americans back at work,” the California Democrat said. “They talked about how they’re going to continue that and they’re going to battle against the disinformation that may come out from the other side.”
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