During a speech at an Obama for America campaign event in Hilliard on Friday morning, former Oho governor Ted Strickland accused Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney of trying to “fake compassion” for victims of Hurricane Sandy, Fox Nation reported.

A clip of Strickland’s speech recorded by CNN follows.

“And then there’s Mitt Romney, who tries to fake compassion by asking people to bring food to a rally,” Strickland said. “And when they don’t do it, they take $5,000 and go out to Wal-Mart and buy food to pass out to the people coming to the rally so that he can get his picture taken with people loading boxes on a truck. Send money – send money to the American Red Cross!”

Strickland, a Democrat who lost his 2010 reelection bid to Governor John Kasich, serves as a national co-chair of President Obama’s campaign. In Ohio, Strickland has been responsible for delivering Obama’s message that Mitt Romney is a heartless corporate raider.

In 2009 – the year before his most recent campaign – Strickland and his wife reported $166,321 in income and $30,749 in charitable contributions, according to The Columbus Dispatch. A total of $15,027 of their charitable giving went toward offsetting their federal health insurance benefits and maintaining the governor’s mansion.

In 2011, Romney and his wife reported gross income of $13,696,951, of which they donated $4,020,772 to charity.

Based on the latest available IRS records for both men, Strickland gave away 18.5 percent of his own income while Romney gave away 29.4 percent.

Although the Obama campaign is still trying to frame Romney as a less compassionate Scrooge McDuck with only four days until the November 6 election, even liberal Politico reported in September that Romney’s charitable giving dwarfed that of President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

Biden and his wife reported $379,035 in income for 2011, and declared $5,540 in charitable contributions – giving 1.5 percent of their gross income to charity despite Biden’s posturing as a caring, blue-collar leader.

Through the spring and summer Strickland diligently attacked Romney’s refusal to release all of the tax returns demanded by the Obama campaign, telling reporters on August 1, “Mitt Romney is hiding something from the American people.”

The talking point was familiar to Strickland, who released years of his own tax returns during Ohio’s 2010 gubernatorial race and criticized Kasich’s failure to respond in kind.

Like Obama and Senator Sherrod Brown, Strickland has praised the $23 billion taxpayer loss to bail out the United Auto Workers (UAW), treating Romney’s opposition to the union bailout as further proof the Republican candidate doesn’t care about “working class people.”

“Mitt Romney never saw the point of building something when he could profit by tearing it down,” Strickland said during his speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte.

Cross-posted from Media Trackers Ohio.