Romney - Super Tuesday
From Canton, Ohio -
Mitt Romney obviously likes to hold campaign events at places where people make things. From the first event I covered with Romney last year in Iowa to an industrial complex here not far from the Pro Football Hall of Fame, it's clear that Romney wants to emphasize small industrial businesses.
Today's event in Canton was at Gregory Industries, which makes highway guardrails and other highway safety products; big coils of metal were in the background of where Romney was speaking, with all kinds of other stuff around the large warehouse type building.
"This is an interesting place," Romney started off his remarks by saying, 'you see a lot of steel around you."
"This is galvanized steel; they take steel, they cut it, they put it through a bath of zinc, galvanizes it and then they make it into various products and sell it around the country and around the world," Romney explained.
In fact several times, he returned to the zinc bath explanation, hammering home his argument that he knows best in the GOP field when it comes to economic issues.
"What we need to talk about to defeat Barack Obama is getting good jobs and scaling back the size of government," Romney said to cheers.
In his Canton event, Romney hit on familiar themes, dinging the Obama Administration and how it has handled the economy, arguing that he would be better suited to finding ways to create new jobs and growth.
"What I know is the economy; I spent my life in the real economy," Romney said, arguing that his main GOP opponents might have talked about economic issues in Congressional subcommittees, but not in the real world.
It was an event that I have covered many times in recent months - Romney at a producer of something talking about how he can help produce jobs.
Last week in Albion, Michigan, I caught Romney at Caster Concepts, a company that makes industrial wheels. Romney was still talking about that visit on Saturday during a rally in Dayton, Ohio as he expressed confidence in the future of U.S. economic growth.
Back in December, it was Missouri Valley Steel in Sioux City, Iowa; In January it was Gilchrist Metal Fabricating in Hudson, New Hampshire and the Ring Power Lift Trucks in Jacksonville, Florida.
They are the kind of places where the white collar crowd wouldn't normally go - it's not a college campus auditorium or a fancy high tech company in the suburbs - it's industrial small business America.
And Romney just seems to get a real boost out of coming to these places to campaign. We'll see how he does in Ohio on Super Tuesday.
