Obama denies class war over big tax call

CHANDLER, Arizona, Thursday

US President Barack Obama on Thursday denied Republican claims he was waging class warfare as he set out to sell his call for tax raise on the rich in states crucial to his reelection bid.

Hours after his combative and populist State of the Union address, Mr Obama appeared first in Iowa, the cradle of the 2008 campaign which swept him to the White House, and then in Arizona, launching a three-day, five-state tour.

Mr Obama hopes to convince voters that his vision of a remodeled economy — where everybody, not just the wealthy, gets “a fair shot” — merits handing him a second term in November’s election.

He argued that those who earn one million dollars a year should pay at least 30 percent in taxes, decrying loopholes which offer rich Americans, like his possible Republican foe Mitt Romney, a much lower rate on investment income.

“I hear a lot of folks running around calling this class warfare,” Mr Obama said at a factory in midwestern Iowa.

“This is not class warfare,” Mr Obama said, citing legendary financier Warren Buffett’s argument that he should pay a higher tax rate on his vast fortune than his own staff pay on their annual income.

“Asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary is common sense,” President Obama said, warning Americans must decide whether to build an equitable economy, fund education and the military or let the rich evade fair taxes.

“We cannot do both. You have got to choose,” Mr Obama said, hammering out his core election message while seeking to defuse Republican claims he is vilifying the rich in a bid to mine envy over their success.

“We don’t begrudge success in America. We aspire to it,” Mr Obama said, speaking in front of a banner that read “An America built to last.”

Previous attempts by Obama to raise taxes on the rich, or to rescind tax cuts on higher earners passed by former president George W. Bush have failed.

So his strategy appears as much an election gambit to portray Republicans as obstructive stooges of the rich at a time of deep income inequality.

Meanwhile, Republican White House hopefuls Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich traded barbs over immigration and character on the eve of a debate today before Florida’s ultra-competitive primary.

The frontrunners — locked in a virtual tie in the polls — spent Wednesday courting Latino voters and sniping at each other as they battled for the chance to take on Democratic President Barack Obama in the November election.
A new CNN poll suggested it was too close to call ahead of next Tuesday’s primary with former Massachusetts governor Romney at 36 percent and former House speaker Gingrich at 34 percent after a series of wild swings.
Trailing them were former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum with 11 percent and Texas congressman Ron Paul on nine percent.

However, a Qunnipiac University poll found Romney tied with Obama at 45 percent in a general election match-up, bolstering the argument that Romney is the most electable Republican.

Mr Gingrich — whom the same poll has trailing Obama 39 percent to 50 percent — has remained on the offensive ahead of the Florida contest, deriding Romney’s suggestion that tough government measures could force illegal immigrants to leave the country through “self-deportation.”

“For Romney to believe that somebody’s grandmother is going to be so cut off that she is going to self-deport, I mean this... is an Obama-level fantasy,” he told an event cosponsored by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and Univision.

Immigration has been a politically fraught subject for both men.

Conservatives have chastised Gingrich as being too soft on illegal immigrants. Romney has taken heat from Latinos for vowing to veto a popular law that would offer permanent residency to high school graduates and those who serve in the military.

More than 450,000 Hispanics in Florida identify themselves as Republicans, making them a crucial demographic in the January 31 party primary, the latest in a series of state contests to decide the nomination.

State-wide there are 1.4 million registered Hispanic voters, according to Florida election officials, making it key a voting bloc in November.

Sensing a vote winner, Gingrich said he would consider popular Cuban American Florida Senator Marco Rubio as vice president if he won his party’s nomination.

And both candidates tried to out-do each other in toughness on Cuba.

With an eye on the state’s one million Cuban Americans, both vowed to support a Cuban uprising should it occur while they are in the White House.

“If there was a genuine legitimate uprising, we would, of course, be on the side of the people,” Gingrich told Spanish-language network Univision.

“We’re very prepared to back people in Libya. We may end up backing people in Syria. But now Cuba? Hands off Cuba? That’s baloney. People of Cuba deserve freedom,” he said.

Romney, speaking at the Freedom Tower, a memorial to Cuban immigration to the United States, said Obama “does not understand that by helping Castro, he is not helping the people of Cuba; he is hurting them.”

Romney said that if he were president he would punish foreign companies doing business in Cuba and “not give Castro gifts.”

Obama has eased some travel and other restrictions but has kept the decades-old US embargo in place, saying he is only willing to change the longstanding policy if Cuba’s communist regime embarks on democratic reforms.

A poll released Wednesday found that Hispanics in Florida prefer Romney to Gingrich, but that Obama has the edge among the key ethnic group nationally.

Among Latinos who plan to vote in the Republican primary, the poll found Romney had a 15-point advantage over Gingrich, 35 to 20 percent.

Supporters of each candidate have taken to Florida’s nearly one dozen television markets to continue the war of words over the other’s character.

A pro-Romney television spot insisted Gingrich is overplaying his links to former president Ronald Reagan, who is beloved by conservatives.

“From debates, you’d think Newt Gingrich was Ronald Reagan’s vice president,” the narrator says, before concluding: “On leadership and character, Gingrich is no Ronald Reagan.”

It appeared to be an attempt to reprise the stunningly effective takedown from the 1988 vice-presidential debate.

Then Lloyd Bentsen ridiculed Dan Quayle’s claim to hold the mantle of John F. Kennedy, with the comment that has become part of American popular culture: “Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

Meanwhile, Republicans responded angrily to Obama’s State of the Union message.

“I think it was a great campaign speech, obviously stoking the class warfare issue,” Senator John McCain, who lost to Obama in the 2008 election, told CNN Wednesday.

House Speaker John Boehner also faulted Obama’s speech, signaling that many of the president’s ideas for job creation and to boost education and manufacturing would likely go nowhere.

“Last night was just another campaign speech,” Boehner said on the Laura Ingraham radio show.

“He wants to take no responsibility for his policies that have failed and made no reference last night to really stepping into the game and legislating.”

Later, Obama flew to Arizona, and was involved in what appeared to be a sharp exchange with the southwestern state’s Republican governor Jan Brewer.

In line with protocol, Brewer met the president at the foot of the stairs to Air Force One and the pair were soon in an animated conversation, with Brewer pointing her finger at the US commander-in-chief.

She handed the president a letter which she said contained an invitation for him to meet with her, but Obama apparently complained about her treatment of him in her book “Scorpions for Breakfast.”

“The president said he’d be glad to meet with her again, but did note that after their last meeting, a cordial discussion in the Oval Office, the governor inaccurately described the meeting in her book,” a White House official said.

Obama and Brewer have had a difficult relationship since his administration decided to sue her state over a controversial immigration law.

The president was due to sleep in another key swing state, Nevada, on Wednesday, before flying on to Colorado and Michigan before he returns to Washington on Friday.

All five states, or a combination of several of the battlegrounds, could help provide a pathway for Obama to secure a second White House term, despite his approval ratings of below 50 percent and a tough economic environment.

(AFP)