“Mitt Romney went back on the attack on Thursday in Virginia, criticizing President Obama for suggesting the creation of a new Cabinet position, a secretary of business,” the Boston Globe writes.
Said Romney: “I don’t think adding a new chair in his Cabinet will help add millions of jobs on Main Street. We don’t need the secretary of business to understand business,” he added. “We need a president who understands business, and I do. And that’s why I’ll help be able to get this economy going again.”
Watch Florida… The L.A. Times’ Lauter notes that Romney’s on a “razor’s edge” in Florida: “Even as the lion's share of attention in the presidential campaign goes to the battleground of Ohio and the storm-battered states of the Mid-Atlantic, the outcome to the south, in the nation's largest swing state, now seems very much in doubt.”
Jeep backfire… “In battleground Ohio the focus of the presidential race has returned to one of President Obama's favorite topics -- the auto industry -- courtesy of Mitt Romney, who brought the issue back to center stage,” USA Today writes.
It notes that automakers and newspapers objected. For example, “Romney's implication that jobs were being shifted overseas earned him a stinging editorial from The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, which called the spot ‘a masterpiece of misdirection’ from a candidate ‘desperate to convince Ohio voters that he's the candidate most committed to the U.S. auto industry – no matter how much confusion he must sow to do it.' The (Toledo) Blade called it ‘an exercise in deception … remarkable even by the standards of his campaign.' An ad watch in The Columbus Dispatch -- the editorial page of which endorsed Romney, unlike the other papers – pointed out the ad's inaccuracy: ‘what is being considered is adding production in China -- not shutting down American Jeep factories such as the one in Toledo.’”
And: Reuters: “A Chrysler executive told Donald Trump in a Tweet on Thursday that the real estate executive and television personality was "full of sh--" for repeating a notion that Chrysler is shipping U.S. Jeep production to China, which the automaker refutes.”
More: Trump, from his Twitter account, said, "Obama is a terrible negotiator. He bails out Chrysler and now Chrysler wants to send all Jeep manufacturing to China--and will!" To which Gilles, from his Twitter account, responded to Trump: ‘You are full of sh--!’ In a second Tweet, Giles added: ‘I apologize for my language, but lies are just that, lies.’”