The interview was Obama’s first since delivering his State of the Union address. Obama hits GOP on immigration

President Barack Obama won’t say whether he thinks Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich would be a tougher challenger, but, either way, he’s certain that the difference between him and the Republican at the top of the ticket will be stark.

“I don’t really think about that,” Obama said in response to a question about who would be more of a threat in an interview with Univision conducted Wednesday night in Chandler, Ariz., and released Thursday morning. “What I can say is this: That whoever their nominee is, they represent ideas that I think are wrong for America.”


“On a whole range of issues I think that whether it’s Mr. Romney or Mr. Gingrich or Mr. Santorum or whoever else they might decide to select, they represent a fundamentally different vision of America. And it’s not the bold generous forward looking optimistic America that I think built this country,” he added.

The interview was Obama’s first since delivering his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, and comes as the Republican presidential candidates are stepping up their appeals to Hispanic voters ahead of next week’s Florida primary. Speaking to one of the top U.S. Spanish-language news outlets, Obama offered his own appeals, noting his efforts to make immigration laws more favorable to immigrants even without the comprehensive reform he’s repeatedly called for.

Obama said he hasn’t been able to accomplish comprehensive reform because of congressional obstruction, as “a lot of Republicans who used to support comprehensive immigration reform decided that it was bad politics and they wouldn’t support it anymore.”

In his State of the Union address, he said, “I couldn’t have been clearer about not only my interest in comprehensive immigration reform, but if we can’t do the whole package, at minimum let’s get the DREAM Act done.”

And he wasn’t shy in noting the opposition of the Republican presidential hopefuls to the DREAM Act, which would create a path to citizenship for young illegal immigrants in college or the military. “We now have two Republican candidates who said they’d veto a DREAM Act,” he said, adding that Republicans’ attitudes demonstrate a “lack of responsibility to the very real stories that are out there.” Romney and Rick Santorum have both said they would veto the DREAM Act, while Gingrich has said he would only support the piece of the bill for people who enter the military. At a debate Monday in Florida, Romney said he now shares Gingrich’s position.

With the unemployment rate for Latinos nationwide hovering around 11 percent — more than two points higher than the nationwide average — Obama said that he has made significant steps to create jobs for the especially hard-hit.

“Everything that we do is designed to help America as a whole grow, but there are certain industries that have been badly affected because of the housing crisis. Latinos have been badly affected by them,” he said. “If we can start helping those areas, then that’s going to give a big boost.”

Obama has spent plenty of time recently arguing that wealthy Americans should pay their fair share in taxes — and laid out the details of his Buffett Rule tax, which would require those making more than a million dollars a year to pay taxes of at least 30 percent — but he wouldn’t say whether Romney, who paid less than 14 percent on the $46 million he earned in 2010, should pay more.

“I’ll let Governor Romney speak to his own taxes,” Obama said. “What I know is that as a general rule, those who are making the most in the top one percent or in the top one-tenth of one percent often times pay lower tax rates than their secretaries, or their drivers, or the people who are working in their homes. And that’s not fair.”

Obama also wouldn’t say whether he’d agree to the call from another Republican hopeful, Newt Gingrich, for a series of seven three-hour Lincoln-Douglass debates. “Well, I’ll let them determine who their standard bearer is going to be. Until the Republicans have a nominee, we don’t have a campaign. Right now they have to decide who it is that they want representing them.”