DENISON – Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney today invoked a Karl Marx reference in seeking to portray leading Democratic White House contenders as liberals eager to hatch big-government schemes.

Speaking to a crowd of about 75 people at Cronk’s Cafe Restaurant & Lounge in Denison just after 8 this morning, Romney suggested that Hillary Clinton is too liberal not only for Middle America, but also much of Europe.

“I’m convinced her platform wouldn’t allow her to get elected president of France, let alone president of the United States,” Romney said.

Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, said he would focus on strong families and a more robust, market-driven economy that rewards personal responsibility and ambition.

“I’m afraid that some of our Democratic Party friends don’t have that vision like we do,” Romney said. “They look beyond the early days of America to the days of Europe of the past and think of big government and big brother and big spending and big taxation.”

He said leading Democratic presidential candidates Clinton, a U.S. senator from New York, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and former U.S. Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, appear attracted to the course of Europe.

“In my view each one of them would take us in a sharp-left turn toward the path Europe has taken,” Romney said.

Specifically, he attacked Clinton for seeking to move the nation toward what Romney called a “shared-responsibility, we’re-all-in it-together society.”

“That’s sort of an out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx kind of philosophy,” Romney said. “This is a country which has been successful in part because we believe in individual initiative, and individual incentives.”

Romney said there are bipartisan solutions to major national issues, such as the fact that there are 45 million Americans with no health insurance.

The answer isn’t government takeover of health insurance, he said, but personal responsibility and more market dynamics.
  “The last thing America needs is Hillarycare,” Romney said.

During the Denison stop, Romney called for more military spending and said the United States should use “enhanced interrogation” – which he insisted is not a euphemism for torture – to get information from suspects in a “ticking-bomb” scenario.

He also credited President George W. Bush with preventing another 9/11-type terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and suggested the Patriot Act has played a major role in keeping Americans alive.

“Our president, for all the criticism he’s received, has kept America safe,” Romney said.

On other issues, Romney said values voters could count on him to promote traditional family structures.

“One way is to teach our kids that marriage comes before babies,” he said.

Romney received applause in Cronk’s after describing his journey to a pro-life position on abortion. He dismissed the “flip” charge and said he was in the company of Ronald Reagan in moving from what could be considered pro-choice positioning to the right-to-life camp.

He also took a shot at the proliferation of pornography available to young eyes on the internet and called for a “one strike and you’re ours” approach to dealing with child-sex predators, criminals he said should have serious punishments. He didn’t elaborate on what that should be.

Asked a question from the largely white, elderly crowd on immigration, Romney said he supports securing the borders and an employment verification system to prevent illegal immigrants from getting jobs in the United States.
He said would oppose any “amnesty” provisions.
“No cutting to the front of the line because you’ve come here illegally,” Romney said.

Romney’s Crawford County campaign chairman, Ted Bliesman, an insurance and real-estate salesman in Denison, said the candidate was successful in hitting a number of topics in the stump speech.

“He did so in a manner that everyone could understand on a regular down-to-earth basis,” Bliesman said.
Dick Watson of Carroll, retired from the wholesale drug business, said Romney is well-versed on the military and family values.

“I thought it was excellent,” Watson said. “I think he’s on target. I like what I hear and I think he will probably be our candidate and hopefully elected.”