After enjoying a four-day media and fundraising blitz following his public endorsement of gay marriage, President Obama is turning attention back to the economy with a $25 million, monthlong ad campaign targeting Republican contender Mitt Romney’s business experience.
“It’s been said this election is going to be about values,” Obama said Monday at a fundraiser in New York, one of several appearances in which he reiterated his support for same-sex marriage. “I absolutely agree. It’s about the economic values we have.”
The ad campaign questions Romney’s fitness for the White House, saying the “lessons” and “values” he learned as head of the private equity firm Bain Capital are out of step with traditional American values. The ad attacks Romney’s claims that he created jobs in the private sector, charging that he created profits for Bain while eliminating jobs.
“[Romney] claims that running Bain Capital … gives him the experience to run the country,” said Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign manager. “His experience was about creating wealth … not creating jobs.”
The campaign renews a weekslong effort by the Obama campaign to highlight several of Bain’s unsuccessful acquisitions, which in some cases resulted in companies filing for bankruptcy and laying off workers.
The first ad in the latest series, released Monday, recounts the story of GST Steel, a steel mill in Kansas City, Mo., that went under eight years after Bain bought it in 1993.
“They made as much money off of it as they could, and they closed it down,” Joe Soptic, a steelworker for 30 years before being laid off from GST, says in the ad.
Jack Cobb, another steelworker, adds: “It was like a vampire. They came in and sucked the life out of us.”
The two-minute ad, airing in Virginia and four other battleground states, directs viewers to an Obama website, RomneyEconomics.com, for more information about Bain’s failures.
The Romney campaign quickly returned fire Monday with a positive ad highlighting one of Bain’s success stories: Steel Dynamics, whose workforce grew from 1,400 to 6,000 under Romney’s management.
“[Steel Dynamics] almost never got started,” Romney’s ad says. “When others shied away, Mitt Romney’s private-sector leadership team stepped in.”
Romney’s ad contends that Bain’s willingness to invest in startup companies helped make the American dream possible for thousands of workers. Romney aides said he left Bain two years before it bought GST Steel, the firm highlighted in Obama’s ad, and so can’t be held responsible for that mill’s bankruptcy.
With the race refocusing on the economy instead of social issues like marriage, Romney launched an attack of his own against Obama, claiming the president lacks a basic understanding of the win-some-lose-some nature of capitalism.
“President Obama and his billion-dollar attack machine are desperately trying to distract from their own failed record of wasteful spending and crony capitalism by launching an attack on free enterprise,” said Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul.
Romney’s campaign also sought to remind voters of Obama’s own blunders, including the $500 million Obama’s administration invested in solar panel maker Solyndra, which then went bankrupt.
“Mitt Romney,” Saul said, “has the experience and pro-growth plan to promote job creation and get our economy back on track.”
