WASHINGTON (AFP) – Mitt Romney Friday compared President Barack Obama's America to the economic blight of 1970s Britain, invoking an iconic campaign advertisement to boost his Republican presidential run.
"Obama Isn't Working" read a mocked-up campaign poster on Romney's website, in tribute to the Conservative Party's devastating "Labour Isn't Working" ad, which helped Margaret Thatcher sweep to power in 1979.
The Romney version, apart from a slogan adapted to Obama, features the same picture of a snaking line of workers outside an unemployment office used by the original ad, designed by the Saatchi and Saatchi agency.
In a posting on Romney's blog, the campaign noted the ad had been referred to as the "poster of the century" and invoked Labour-led Britain's economic climate of high unemployment, rising inflation and a growing national debt.
"Those conditions and the public discontent throughout the country during that election and the parallels that Americans face today cannot be ignored," the post said.
"With 9.1 percent unemployed, record deficits, a soaring national debt, and millions of struggling families, one thing is clear -- Obama isn't working, either."
The blog tribute to former British prime minister Thatcher, a heroine for US conservatives, was released after the Boston Globe reported that Romney would travel to London next month to drum up campaign cash from Americans abroad.
Republican frontrunner Romney is building his campaign for next year's primary and caucus nominating contests on a lacerating critique of Obama's economic management, saying the president has made things worse.
"Now, in the third year of his four-year term, we have more than promises and slogans to go by. Barack Obama has failed America," Romney said when he launched his campaign in New Hampshire on June 2.
The former Massachusetts governor on Friday also released a new web ad, featuring video of Obama taken in February 2009 in which the president said if he had not turned the economy around within three years he could be a one-term president.
