Party Time: Obama and Romney to Meet at White House Thursday

Katie Pavlich | November 28, 2012 12:30 PM

The 2012 campaign may be over but that isn't stopping Mitt Romney and President Obama from continuing to spend time together. Tomorrow the two will have lunch at the White House, a place where Obama lives and where Romney had hoped to live. But why are they meeting? Obama announced he would meet with Romney shortly after the election to go over ideas about how to deal with the fiscal cliff. If I'm not mistaken, the entire campaign was about that but whatever, what's wrong with having lunch?

Obama aides said they reached out to Romney's team shortly before Thanksgiving to start working on a date for the meeting. The two men will meet in the White House's private dining room, with no press coverage expected.

While in Washington, Romney will also meet with his former running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, according to a Romney campaign aide. Ryan is back on Capitol Hill, where he's involved in negotiations to avert a series of automatic tax increases and deep spending cuts that have come to be known as the "fiscal cliff."

Obama and Romney's sit-down Thursday will likely be their most extensive private meeting ever. The two men had only a handful of brief exchanges before the 2012 election.

Obama sees his reelection as a green light to raise taxes on the "rich." Romney however has expressed since the election that Obama was reelected because of gifts he gave away and promised to supporters.

Saying that he and his team still felt “troubled” by his loss to President Obama, Mitt Romney on Wednesday attributed his defeat in part to what he called big policy “gifts” that the president had bestowed on loyal Democratic constituencies, including young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics.

In a conference call with fund-raisers and donors to his campaign, Mr. Romney said Wednesday afternoon that the president had followed the “old playbook” of using targeted initiatives to woo specific interest groups — “especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people.”

“In each case, they were very generous in what they gave to those groups,” Mr. Romney said, contrasting Mr. Obama’s strategy to his own of “talking about big issues for the whole country: military strategy, foreign policy, a strong economy, creating jobs and so forth.”