Romney provided few new details about his policy proposals. Mitt on Meet: No tax cuts for rich

Mitt Romney insisted he wouldn’t cut taxes on the rich and pushed back strongly on the idea that he isn’t empathetic to the struggles of everyday Americans in a tough economy in a rare Sunday morning interview.

“We care very deeply about this country. Those people who try to minimize the feeling and the connection we have with the American people really miss the mark,” Romney said, with his wife, Ann, by his side on his campaign bus, giving his first interview to NBC’s “Meet the Press” since 2009.


In one of the GOP nominee’s most detailed recent interviews, Romney talked tax cuts, balancing the budget, the auto bailout, Medicare and foreign policy.

But even when pressed, the Republican presidential nominee provided few new details about his own policy proposals. Romney has avoided the Sunday morning talk circuit and has appeared on the shows only a handful of times during his 2012 run for president. Sunday’s interview was taped Friday and Saturday.

Coming on the heels of the Democratic convention, Romney was at pains to stress that, if elected, he doesn’t intend to cut taxes on wealthy Americans — though he would close some loopholes in the Tax Code that they now use — and that he wouldn’t raise taxes on middle-income voters.

“I’m not going to increase the tax burden on middle-income families,” Romney said. “It would absolutely be wrong to do that.”

But asked by NBC’s David Gregory to name a loophole in the Tax Code that he would close for high-income taxpayers, Romney didn’t provide an example.

“Well, I can tell you that people at the high end, high-income taxpayers, are going to have fewer deductions and exemptions,” Romney said. “Those numbers are going to come down. Otherwise, they’d get a tax break. And I want to make sure people understand, despite what the Democrats said at their convention, I am not reducing taxes on high-income taxpayers.”

Romney was asked by Gregory about the last time he “really got to spend some quality time with somebody who was out of work.”

“Well actually just last night … I was with a person who is facing some challenges,” Romney said. “We spent some time together and shared our personal experiences in an effort on my part to point out that we can make it through tough times.”

Romney had no public events the evening of Sept. 6 and spent it at his home on Lake Winnipesaukee in Wolfeboro, N.H. At the time, the campaign did not advise that Romney had any visitors there.

Previewing how he might handle a looming fiscal fight over trimming the deficit if he were elected, Romney criticized both President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans — including, though not by name, his vice presidential pick Paul Ryan since he supported the deal — for backing a budgetary compromise that resolved the debt ceiling impasse last summer. It included a promise to slash defense and domestic spending equally if future budget cuts couldn’t be agreed upon.

“This sequester idea of the White House, I think, is an extraordinarily big mistake; [it was] a mistake for Republicans to go along with it,” Romney said.

The Obama campaign has tried to paint Romney, a former private equity specialist and businessman, as out of touch with middle-class problems. The Obama-allied super PAC Priorities USA has run television ads portraying him as a corporate villain who has repeatedly laid off workers for his own personal profit.

In the interview, Ann Romney defended her husband, as she did at the GOP convention at Tampa, as being able to empathize with everyday struggles despite his wealth.

“Mitt and I do recognize that we have not had a financial struggle in our lives,” Ann Romney said in explaining her convention speech. “But I want people to believe in their hearts that we know what it is like to struggle. And our struggles have not been financial, but they’ve been with health and with difficulties in different things in life.”

She added: “For people to think that we don’t have empathy just because we’re not struggling [with money] is ridiculous.”

After arguing for months that Obama was slowing the economic recovery, Romney made the case that the economy would get even worse if the president is reelected.

“A crisis potential at our doorstep; the kind that you’re seeing in Europe today,” Romney said. “There’s no question in my mind if President Obama is reelected, you’re not going to see our unemployment picture change dramatically. You’re not going to see us create the jobs we need to create or the rising incomes people need.”

It was a sharper attack than usual for Romney, who has based his entire campaign on his economic recovery message but has struggled at times with how to respond when conditions appeared to be improving, even if at a slow pace. The newest set of employment numbers released on Friday showed a lower-than-expected gain of 95,000 new jobs, but a dip in the unemployment rate to 8.1 percent.

Romney also said that he would attempt to balance the budget by the end of his second term instead of his first.

“I’ll balance the budget by the end of my second term,” Romney said. “Doing it in the first term would cause, I believe, a dramatic impact on the economy. Too dramatic.”

Romney also tried to combat the attacks being waged against him over his opposition to the government-backed rescue of General Motors.

“My view was General Motors should have gone into bankruptcy earlier,” Romney said. “The president resisted that for six months.“

Democrats have latched on to a New York Times opinion piece he wrote headlined, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” The issue of the auto bailout is not only important to voters in Michigan, Romney’s home state where he is hoping to compete despite being down in the polls, but also in Ohio, where workers in the auto industry make up a large portion of the vote.

“I said, ‘Let ’em go into bankruptcy. Help them come out. But let them go in,’” Romney said, repeating a line that has been blasted by Democrats. “And I don’t think most Americans know that GM went bankrupt. That they did go bankrupt. The president put them into bankruptcy.”