President Barack Obama's chief campaign strategist, David Axelrod, continued to attack Republican frontrunner and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney Wednesday morning, following the Republican debate Tuesday night in Las Vegas.
"He has been bumping along at like a quarter of the vote in the Republican primary and there seems to be resistance to him," he said on CBS' "The Early Show." "I think there is a sense there is no core to him," he added.
"Mitt Romney finally conceded, 'Yes I had illegals working on my property from a lawn service.' He said, 'I went to the lawn service and said, for Pete's sake I can't have illegals, I'm running for office!' And, not it was wrong; not, it was illegal; but I'm running for office," Axelrod said. "I thought that was the most unintentionally revealing moment of the debate."
Romney hired a landscaping company to do lawn work on his Belmont, Mass. home that employed undocumented immigrants. In 2006, when confronted with the accusation, he allowed the company to continue working so long as they stopped employing undocumented immigrants. Romney ultimately fired the company after a second Boston Globe story revealed that the company still hired undocumented immigrants.
Axelrod also hit Romney over health care. "We modeled our health care program largely on what he did in Massachusetts, and now he says it was never intended to be a model for the nation. In 2007, he said this will be a model," Axelrod said. "Time and time again, Gov. Romney switches from one position to another apparently because he is running for office."
"If I were sitting over there in the Romney camp, I would be wondering why people aren’t buying the dog food. And this is not a reference to strapping the dog on the…" he said Tuesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," referring to a 1983 Romney family summer vacation where he strapped a dog kennel with the family dog inside to the top of a car, before some laughter ensued.
On "The Early Show" Wednesday morning, Axelrod also hit former Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain on a study that showed that his 999 plan would raise taxes on 84 percent of filers, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry's plan to create jobs by expanding domestic energy production.