The ink was barely dry on Wednesday’s Tax Policy Center study — chock full of ugly truths about Mitt Romney’s tax plan — before the Obama campaign had turned the dry text into a snappy TV ad.
Chopping the study’s key finding — that Romney’s tax plan will raise taxes on just about everyone except the exceptionally wealthy — into a convenient take home-size was a central focus of the Obama campaign this week and it used every method available to it to do so, including the president himself.
“An independent, non-partisan study found that one plan at least would give more tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires, and they’d pay for those tax cuts by raising taxes on the middle class — an average tax hike of more than $2,000 for families with children,” President Obama said at a White House event focused on his support for an extension of the Bush tax cuts on middle class families Friday.
That came after a couple days of targeted efforts by the Obama campaign to put the Tax Policy Center study front and center since the study dropped on Wednesday.
The Obama campaign points to some half dozen campaign emails and online projects it devoted to the study this week when asked about the Tax Policy Center study push. The efforts included an online calculator the Obama campaign said would calculate a voter’s tax bill under Romney, an interactive map showing the “impact” of Romney’s plans on various states, and an email to supporters that pointed them to the study and its findings.
The study gives Team Obama a chance to cite a independent voice backing up its claim that Romney is the wrong choice for the middle class, as this campaign email to supporters suggests:
This isn’t our analysis — it’s the conclusion of report released by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center this week. They dug into the details of Romney’s plan, ran the numbers, and determined how it all shakes out for real people.
Breaking down the report was a focus of another of the campaign’s now-ubiquitous Stephanie Cutter videos. The Obama deputy campaign manager holds up an earmarked copy of the report in the clip and goes through it:
The campaign ran the full 2:57 video as a preroll ad on other YouTube clips this week. The campaign told TPM they’ve used Cutter videos as pre-roll ads before, but presenting nearly three minutes of chatter about a 20-page tax policy analysis is not generally the stuff of internet ads.
Though the Romney campaign has used TPC studies to its own benefit in the past, this time it called the group’s findings “a joke.”
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