Obama Campaign Releases Ad Attacking Romney’s Record at Bain
Published at
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images(CHICAGO) — Remember a few months ago when Mitt Romney’s rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich, compared Romney’s work at Bain Capital to “rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company”?
Gingrich may be gone, but now the Obama campaign is giving his words new life in an ad campaign they are unveiling on Monday that raises thorny questions about Romney’s work at the private equity firm — work that he touts on the campaign trail.
At first glance, the portrait that the Obama campaign’s new message paints is devastating. It tells the story of a Kansas City steel company, purchased by Bain in 1993, that subsequently went bankrupt.
As the Obama campaign tells it, “Romney and his partners loaded it with debt, closed the Kansas City plant and walked away with a healthy profit, leaving hundreds of employees out of work with their pensions in jeopardy.”
One of workers who lost their job at the plant, Joe Soptic, appears in the ad.
“It makes me angry,” Soptic says in the video. “Those guys were all rich. They all had more money than they’ll ever spend, yet they didn’t have the money to take care of the very people that made the money for them.”
Another affected steel worker featured in the two-minute spot adds, “We view Mitt Romney as a job destroyer.”
The Romney campaign dismissed the ad Monday morning as Team Obama’s attempt to “distract voters from the fact that their policies are not working.”
“President Obama can’t come close to matching the many years of experience that Mitt Romney has as a private businessman so he has chosen to attack it,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in a statement.
The campaign also pointed out that the bankruptcy of the Kansas City company, GST Steel, occurred after Romney had already relinquished day-to-day control of Bain in order to run the Salt Lake City Olympic Games.
For those keeping score at home, this is the Obama campaign’s seventh multi-state ad buy of the cycle. It will hit television screens in Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio