In an appearance on David Letterman Tuesday night, President Obama blasted Mitt Romney’s “47 percent video,” saying “you’ve got to work for everybody, not just some.”
Capitalizing on perhaps the GOP presidential candidate’s weakest point in the campaign, Obama cast Romney as divisive and only interested in his own wealthy backers.
“What I said on election night was: ‘even though you didn’t vote for me, I hear your voices and I’m going to work as hard as I can to be your president,” Obama said on CBS’s “Late Show With David Letterman. “What I said on election night was even though you didn’t vote for me, I hear your voices and I’m going to work as hard as I can to be your president.”
When I meet Republicans. They are hard-working, family people, who care deeply about this country.”
Obama won applause from the studio audience when he said:
“One of the things I’ve learned as president is you represent the entire country.”
“My expectation is if you want to be president, you’ve got to work for everybody, not just for some.”
Romney on Tuesday was still reeling after a leaked video from a private campaign fund-raiser showed him calling 47 percent of Americans entitled and saying that as president: “my job is not to worry about those people.”
The video, which first appeared on the Mother Jones Web site Monday, lit up the blogosphere, setting Romney back from his attempt to show that he is not an out-of-touch millionaire.
“Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax,” Romney said at the May fund-raiser. Romney said in the video that his role “is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Obama said that in 2008, it was his Republican opponent John McCain who won only 47 percent of the vote. Obama went on to win the presidency.
Getty Images
