Obama Starts East Coast Campaign Swing on Romney’s Home Turf

President Barack Obama linked Republican Mitt Romney to the outsourcing of U.S. jobs overseas and ridiculed Romney’s advisers for making a distinction between “outsourcing” and “offshoring.”

“You cannot make this stuff up,” Obama told supporters at Oyster River High School in Durham, New Hampshire, his first stop in a four-state, two day campaign fundraising swing.

Obama said Romney supports “top-down” economic policies of past Republican administrations that were tested and failed.

Obama, campaigning in a state where Mitt Romney has a lakeside home, also appealed to New England independents with a promise to “work with anyone of any party who believes that we are in this together.” His next stop after New Hampshire is Boston, where Romney served as Massachusetts governor.

Obama and his campaign surrogates have been criticizing Romney for sending U.S. manufacturing jobs overseas when he was head of Bain Capital. The Washington Post reported June 21 that the Boston-based private-equity firm that Romney helped found in 1984, invested in multiple firms specializing in relocating U.S. jobs to low-wage countries.

Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said the report was flawed. It didn’t differentiate between “domestic outsourcing versus off-shoring,” work done overseas to support U.S. exports, she said.

Obama’s trip comes as the president and his administration prepare for a ruling June 28 from the Supreme Court on the validity of the 2010 health care overhaul. He made no mention of that case, or an immigration law ruling that the court made today, in his Durham remarks.

The president will use his Boston stop to promote Democrat Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign in Massachusetts. Tomorrow he’ll visit Atlanta and Florida, and seek to deepen ties with Hispanic donors in swing-state Florida.

Obama is campaigning today in New Hampshire and in Boston, and tomorrow in Atlanta and Miami, where he’ll make a fresh appeal to Hispanic voters.

He was set to attend three fundraisers in the Boston area. Warren said yesterday in a post on the social networking site Twitter that she would introduce Obama at one of the events. The Harvard law professor, who conceived Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is challenging incumbent Senator Scott Brown, a Massachusetts Republican.

The Boston-area events include a campaign roundtable with 25 guests and tickets at $40,000 each, an 1,800-donor speech at Symphony Hall with ticket prices starting at $144 and dinner for 100 at a private home in Weston, Massachusetts, with tickets at $17,900 per person, according to a campaign official who asked not to be identified by name.

Tomorrow, Obama is to hold two fundraisers in Atlanta, including a 500-donor event with tickets starting at $250, and a campaign roundtable with 20 donors paying $35,000. In Miami, he’ll attend a 30-donor fundraiser at a private home with tickets at $40,000 each, as well as a 1,500-donor event featuring singer Marc Anthony, with tickets starting at $44.

The money raised goes to the president’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties.