The Republican Party hit back quickly, deriding the president’s quip as the latest empty gesture from a Democratic incumbent with nothing new to offer.
“Mr. Severely Conservative wants you to think he was severely kidding about everything he said over the last year,” Obama said at a rally attended by some 9,000 people at a university campus outside Washington.
It marked a clear escalation of the tone the president is employing to attack his Republican rival in the tight race for the White House, with the election less than three weeks away.
The two men face off Monday in Florida for the last of three debates, this time focusing on foreign policy.
The president said the former Massachusetts governor used to claim, for instance, that he was the ideal candidate for the conservative movement known as the Tea Party.
“Now, suddenly, he’s saying, ‘what, who, me?’” Obama said, drawing laughs from the crowd.
“I mean, he’s changing up so much and backtracking and sidestepping, we’ve got to name this condition that he’s going through. I think it’s called ‘Romnesia.’ That’s what it’s called. I think that’s what he’s going through.”