Obama makes appeal to Latino voters

>>> an obama super-pac is teaming up with an employees union to launch a $4 million spanish ad campaign trying to hit mitt romney where it hurts, with the hispanic community.

>> you can focus on the very poor. that's not my focus.

>> bill burton is co-founder of priorities usa, the pro-obama super-pac. john is a republican political consultant to ran rick santorum 's political campaign . john, do you think that is going to be effective with spanish americans ? eric just said hispanics are as concerned about the economy as everybody else and they are going to respond to the jobs numbers and what they think the president is or is not doing, but what about immigration and some of the other issues?

>> first of all, i don't think this is about immigration. i think end of the day , if you look at the hispanic ad you just saw, if you look at the bain capital ads, they are all the same. what they are, they are somewhat divisive, they are middle class warfare. i believe what the obama campaign has come to the conclusion they don't have a record to run on. you can't run on mediocrity. what they decided is we celebrate success in this country and everybody knows romney has been successful. they're now going to try to taint that success. i think what they're going to try to do is discredit him with the middle class , be it hispanic or with blue collar voters in the midwest.

>> bill, you designed or decided to run the ad, commissioned it. what is the strategy behind this ad?

>> a couple things. the message in this ad and a lot of our advertisements isn't that dissimilar to what john was saying when he was working on senator santorum 's campaign, which is that mitt romney 's a guy that is a lot more for wall street than for main street . that's not class warfare . that's an honest assessment of his policies. when we designed this ad, what we did was talked to voters and what we heard from hispanic americans , they were disturbed by the things mitt romney had to say in his own words about the economy, about joking about firing people, joking about being unemployed. so what we're doing is telling the story of mitt romney and what kind of values he has through just regular folks who live in the hispanic community.

>> you know, watching the healing, the coming together, and seen it in a lot of ways, of the republican party since the primary and mitt romney has done a pretty good job, you could argue, of pulling everybody together. but jeb bush , speaking on the bloomberg -- at the bloomberg breakfast today, talking about back to my dad's time or ronald reagan 's time. they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support that right now would be difficult to imagine happening. because of the nature of the republican party right now. your campaign partly symbolized the nature of the republican party which has moved very far away from compromise and getting things done on capitol hill .

>> one thing i would say is our party is very unified for this reason. barack obama is the great unifier. the one thing we understand is that higher taxes don't work. the one thing we understand is that obamacare has put american jobs at great risk. the other thing that we realize is that if you compare records, where you have mitt romney unemployment rate in massachusetts , 4.7%, this president, 8.2%, if you put those things together and show that to the american people , believe me, this entire country will be unified on who should be president.

>> keep in mind, this was during a great boom time in this country. massachusetts actually went from 37th in the nation in job growth down to 47th in job growth . so if you look at the trend lines, they were moving in the wrong direction. just the hispanic community, also, unemployment has been moving in a downward trajectory as well. i agree that there are two people, two competing visions, but you know, i think when the american people size up the two different candidates, they want the one with a proven record of growth, not what they saw in massachusetts .

>> then why are you running ads attacking romney instead of running ads that promote this president's agenda which nobody seems to be doing? it seems to me the democrats have already given up.

>> the president is promoting his agenda and actually has tens of millions of dollars on tv talking about --

>> how well did he do in the briefing room on friday promoting his agenda?

>> the whole reason the president went out there was to talk about the fact that the economy is not growing fast enough, that we have to do more.

>> i know. but in reality, when he said the private sector is doing just fine, what went on in your stomach as you were watching it?

>> well, there's no doubt that, you know, that it was -- there was a distraction that's been created here, right, but if you look at how mitt romney responded to that by saying the lesson of wisconsin is america doesn't want more teachers, firefighters and cops, that's not where the american people are. to hear that from romney , you get a clear sense of what the two competing visions for this country are.

>> what is rick santorum 's new proposal? i wasn't quite clear. i saw what he said about it in chicago on friday, but what is this new campaign that he's --

>> if you go to patriotvoices.com, you can see for yourself. but where rick santorum got almost four million votes in the republican primary , won 11 states, tied two others, when he was out there, he realized there's a great frustration of many voices in this country who feel they are not being heard. what he wanted to do was galvanize these people, give them a voice by collectively being together --

>> on behalf of mitt romney ?

>> on behalf of --

>> is this the time to launch some other thing rather than getting behind the nominee?

>> that's something in the sense that one of the top priorities is beating barack obama . but it's also to give them a place to go to understand what's going on in washington and also, to make sure that people that they do help get elected, they also hold them accountable that they live up to the promises that they say they are going to have.

>> sounds like we haven't heard the last of rick santorum at all.

>> absolutely not.

>> you know, these candidates, the whole problem with the campaign is that we hear from these candidates and they keep misspeaking. if we could just watch the ads, everything would be safe and well oiled . that's another whole --

>> we will try to keep putting together good ads.

>> thank you very much, gentlemen. good to see you again.