Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney responded to reports about a now-abandoned super PAC plan being reviewed by Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts to attack President Obama by tying him to controversial minister Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He rejected the strategy and said that he wants to focus his campaign on the economy. Romney also took a shot at the president’s campaign, which he said is focusing on “assassinating” his character.
“I repudiate that effort. I think it’s the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign. I hope that our campaigns can respectively be about the future and about issues and about a vision for America,” Romney said at a Florida press conference. “I’ve been disappointed in the president’s candidate to date, which has focused on character assassination. I just think that we’re wiser to talk about the issues of the day, what we’d do to get a working again and talk about our respective records.”
The former Massachusetts governor was referring to an ad the president’s re-election campaign ran Wednesday in key states that targeted Bain Capital, a private equity firm that Romney headed. According to one former GST Steel worker who was laid off, Bain “was like a vampire. They came in and sucked the life out of us.”
Romney defended his record at Bain and said the ad attempted to characterize him inaccurately.

“Our approach was to always try and make the enterprise more successful and the purpose of the president’s ads are not to describe success and failure but to somehow suggest that I’m not a good person or not a good guy. I think the American people will know better than that if they don’t already,” Romney said.
He also announced that his campaign would air its first television ad in the next few days and that it would be positive and focus on what he’d do as president.

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(Photo: Courtesy MSNBC)