The Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney has just opened up a new front for his fight against Barack Obama which accuses him for the failing US education system being under the control of the union bosses who are unwilling to accept reforms.

This is a somewhat rare distraction from Romney’s normal campaign focus which is generally on the weak economy. Romney described his education plan in a speech that represented his most overt appeal to date to Hispanic voters, a demographic that has mostly sided with the Democratic Party. Even though Romney trails Obama by large numbers among Hispanic voters he did not address one of the top concerns among Hispanics – how to find a solution for the country’s immigration system.

Instead Romney described the education system for American children as Third World education while offering proposals that he would like to reward teachers for the results instead of based on their seniority. Romney would also like to give parents a greater choice of where to send their children to school.

“I believe the president must be troubled by the lack of progress since he took office. Most likely, he would’ve liked to do more. But the teachers unions are one of the Democratic biggest donors – and one of the president’s biggest campaign supporters. So, president Obama has been unable to stand up the union bosses and unwilling to stand up for kids,” said Romney.

While all this was going on Obama was at a series of fundraisers going against Romney’s record as a job cutting private equity executive, while explaining his own economic plans to move the country forward.

Obama told a group of supporters in Denver, “I think he has learned the wrong lessons.” At this event several anti-Obama protesters were holding signs that read “out of hope, ready for change” and “bye-bye on November 6”.

Obama went on to say “His working assumption is: if CEOs and wealthy investors like him get rich, the rest of us automatically will to. We believe in the free market, we believe in risk-taking and innovation. This whole area is built on risk-taking innovation but we also understand that it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens because of outstanding schools and universities, it happens because of a well-regulated financial market, it happens because we have extraordinary infrastructure. It happens for a whole host of reasons. Governor Romney doesn’t seem to understand that.”