Obama trying to undermine Romney’s record on jobs

KEN THOMAS

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Pres­i­dent Barack Obama tried Mon­day to tar­nish Mitt Rom­ney as a cor­po­rate titan who got rich by cut­ting rather than cre­at­ing jobs, open­ing a new effort to under­cut the Republican’s claims that his back­ground of busi­ness suc­cess is just what Amer­ica needs in a time of deep eco­nomic uncertainty.

At the cen­ter of the Obama cam­paign effort are a new web­site, TV ad and online video includ­ing inter­views with one­time work­ers at a Kansas City, Mo., steel mill that Romney’s for­mer pri­vate equity firm failed to suc­cess­fully restruc­ture. Work­ers lost jobs and health care ben­e­fits. Pen­sions were reduced.

“It was like a vam­pire. They came in and sucked the life out of us,” says steel­worker Jack Cobb. Add John Wise­man: “Bain Cap­i­tal walked away with a lot of money that they made off this plant. We view Mitt Rom­ney as a job destroyer.

Coun­ter­ing the crit­i­cism, Romney’s cam­paign said the for­mer Mass­a­chu­setts gov­er­nor wel­comes an election-season con­ver­sa­tion with Obama about jobs. In fact, Rom­ney alone helped spur more pub­lic and pri­vate jobs than Obama has for the nation, the Repub­li­can cam­paign argues.

.Both can­di­dates are seek­ing to pivot to vot­ers’ No. 1 issue, the econ­omy, and away from the social issues that dom­i­nated after the pres­i­dent announced his sup­port for gay mar­riage last week.

Obama steered clear of crit­i­ciz­ing Rom­ney dur­ing a com­mence­ment speech at Barnard Col­lege in New York though he included a pass­ing ref­er­ence to nearby Wall Street, say­ing: “Some folks in the finan­cial world have not exactly been model cor­po­rate cit­i­zens.” He left the more direct skew­er­ing to sur­ro­gates and dis­patched Vice Pres­i­dent Joe Biden to Ohio to cas­ti­gate Rom­ney over his record at Bain. That was one of sev­eral events planned to high­light the Republican’s role in the com­pany he founded.

Rom­ney, mean­while, pre­pared to deliver a speech Tues­day in Iowa on reduc­ing the huge fed­eral deficit.

Monday’s dreary global finan­cial back­drop set the stage for a sharp debate in the com­ing weeks between the can­di­dates over their com­pet­ing eco­nomic philoso­phies, and it high­lighted the public’s unhap­pi­ness with big busi­ness and gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tions alike.

JPMor­gan Chase’s dis­clo­sure that it lost more than $2 bil­lion on bad trad­ing bets renewed calls for tighter over­sight of the nation’s biggest finan­cial insti­tu­tions, a posi­tion that Obama has sup­ported and Rom­ney has opposed. And world mar­kets were ten­u­ous as Greece weighed whether to renege on the terms of its painful aus­ter­ity pro­gram and leave the Euro cur­rency bloc. That could hurt Obama’s attempts to accel­er­ate the limp­ing U.S. recovery.

Rom­ney and Obama alike con­tend that in a nation where unem­ploy­ment is hov­er­ing around 8 per­cent, vot­ers will choose a pres­i­dent based on eco­nomic argu­ments. Obama is try­ing to per­suade vot­ers to stick with him as he her­alds an eco­nomic rebound, as slug­gish as it is. Rom­ney coun­ters that only he — with his deep back­ground in busi­ness — knows how to jump­start the nation’s job market.

The two men have lit­tle in com­mon in their views of how to get the coun­try moving.

Obama has pumped money into the econ­omy to stim­u­late growth and has cut some taxes though he also advo­cates rais­ing taxes on the wealth­i­est Amer­i­cans. Rom­ney argues that lower taxes across the board and fewer gov­ern­ment restric­tions are the answer. Both are try­ing to win over an elec­torate that is furi­ous with Wall Street and dis­trust­ful of cor­po­ra­tions, and Obama’s new cam­paign effort was squarely aimed at working-class vot­ers, a group that has been reluc­tant to sup­port the pres­i­dent in the past.

Obama’s TV ad was sched­uled to run in five bat­tle­ground states — Iowa, Ohio, Penn­syl­va­nia, Vir­ginia and Col­orado — and was part of a larger $25 mil­lion, month-long cam­paign. But it was lim­ited in scope.

Repub­li­can offi­cials track­ing the ad buy said the Obama team was air­ing the 2-minute spot only on Wednes­day in the five states. The ad was expected to run dur­ing the evening news, direct­ing view­ers to an Obama web­site about Romney’s eco­nomic record and a longer, 6-minute ver­sion of the ad appear­ing online.

As Obama’s cam­paign was rais­ing Romney’s record in pri­vate equity, the pres­i­dent him­self was head­ing to two fundrais­ers, includ­ing a $35,800-per-person din­ner at the home of Hamil­ton “Tony” James, the pres­i­dent of Black­stone Group, the nation’s largest pri­vate equity firm.

Romney’s cam­paign, mean­while, aggres­sively worked behind the scenes to counter the Obama campaign’s Bain message.

It released a Web video about a suc­cess­ful steel com­pany that Bain invested in called Steel Dynam­ics. The video shows steel­work­ers describ­ing the com­pany as the embod­i­ment of the Amer­i­can dream, not­ing that the com­pany grew from a work­force of 1,400 to more than 6,000. That video was not imme­di­ately planned for television.

Rom­ney also dis­patched Ed Gille­spie, a senior cam­paign strate­gist, to a con­fer­ence call with con­ser­v­a­tive blog­gers on Mon­day to respond to the Obama ad. The cam­paign planned to frame the attacks on Romney’s record at Bain as an “attack on free enter­prise,” and to cast the auto bailout as an exam­ple of pri­vate equity at work.

Ear­lier this year, Rom­ney pre­viewed his coun­ter­at­tack, say­ing of Obama: “He’s now been a ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist at Solyn­dra, Fisker, Tesla; and he’s been a pri­vate equity guy at Gen­eral Motors and Chrysler. So I’ll be talk­ing about his record when I’m fac­ing him.”

Rom­ney, a mul­ti­mil­lion­aire, left Bain in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympic Games but main­tained a finan­cial inter­est in the com­pany after depart­ing. He has said that his firm had a strong over­all track record, cre­at­ing jobs in promi­nent com­pa­nies like Sta­ples and Sports Author­ity, while acknowl­edg­ing that some com­pa­nies Bain invested in were unsuccessful.

The Obama ad, which reprises crit­i­cism lev­eled at Rom­ney dur­ing the Repub­li­can pri­maries, focuses on one of those unsuc­cess­ful com­pa­nies, GST Steel.

Bain was the major­ity share­holder in GST begin­ning in 1993. The com­pany even­tu­ally filed for bank­ruptcy in 2001, a period in which the U.S. steel indus­try was roiled by a flood of cheap steel imports. About 750 work­ers lost their jobs, and were left with­out health ben­e­fits and with reduced pen­sions. The fed­eral gov­ern­ment was forced to put $44 mil­lion into the company’s under­funded pen­sion plan.

Bain received $12 mil­lion on its $8 mil­lion ini­tial invest­ment and at least $4.5 mil­lion in con­sult­ing fees, accord­ing to a Jan­u­ary report by Reuters.

Bain Cap­i­tal said Mon­day that it invested more than $100 mil­lion into the steel com­pany at a time when the indus­try “came under enor­mous pres­sure and nearly half of all U.S. steel com­pa­nies went into bankruptcy.”

Crit­i­cism of Romney’s time at Bain emerged dur­ing his 1994 U.S. Sen­ate race against Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and flared this year dur­ing the GOP pres­i­den­tial primaries.

Repub­li­can Newt Gin­grich called Romney’s role in the pri­vate equity firm “exploitive” and “not defensible.”

Democ­rats view the cur­rent period as an impor­tant time to define Romney’s eco­nomic record for gen­eral elec­tion vot­ers. The president’s defend­ers say he can ill afford to allow Rom­ney to present him­self as a can-do Mr. Fix-It on the econ­omy dur­ing the sum­mer and into the fall.

“Rom­ney is still a blank slate for this new audi­ence. They haven’t focused on the cam­paign the same way pri­mary vot­ers have,” said Tad Devine, a Demo­c­ra­tic strate­gist who pro­duced the ads for Kennedy’s cam­paign against Rom­ney. “This infor­ma­tion, as it’s pre­sented, I think is going to be pretty valid.”

Posted by AP News on May 14 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.