Mitt Romney hits Obama on ‘doing fine’ line in new TV ad

In a new television ad, GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is featuring President Obama’s statement last week that “the private sector’s doing fine.”

It’s the Republican candidate’s first purely negative ad, straying from the “Day One” theme he has been setting.

A clip of Obama’s words are repeated three times. The video ends with the text, “How can President Obama fix our economy if he doesn’t understand it’s broken?”

That closing line — in fact, the whole ad — very closely mirrors an attack Obama aired against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008. McCain had said that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” a line Obama’s ad repeated three times before asking, “How can John McCain fix our economy if he doesn’t understand it’s broken?”

Romney’s campaign already put out a Web video on the comment.

Like McCain did in 2008, Obama and his campaign have argued that the remark should be placed in context.

In the news conference where he made it, the president was pushing Republicans to pass a jobs bill that create more public-sector jobs. He was trying to argue that the private sector was expanding, if slowly, while the public sector is still laying people off.