US PRESIDENT Barack Obama has for the first time publicly approved of video attacks on his Republican rival Mitt Romney’s record as the founder and former chief executive of Bain Capital, one of the US’s largest private equity firms.
“This issue is not a ‘distraction’,” Mr Obama told a press conference late on Monday. “This is what the campaign is going to be about.”
Mr Romney accused Mr Obama of “continuing his attacks on the free enterprise system”. But Mr Obama insisted that questions about the role of Mr Romney and Bain were legitimate because “his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business expertise”.
As the war of the campaign videos continued into a second week, Mr Obama dismantled Mr Romney’s rationale: “When you’re president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximise profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot,” he said.
“If your main argument for how to grow the economy is ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors’, then you’re missing what this job is about.”
In the Obama campaign’s first Bain attack advertisement, steel workers recounted how they lost everything when Bain bought their company.
A second, six-minute advertisement released this week shows former workers from American Pad Paper, known as Ampad, which was purchased by Bain in the early 1990s.
“You don’t come in and just take everything, everybody’s job and destroy a business. I mean, that’s what they did,” says a former Ampad employee.
“You can tell by the way he acts, the way he talks. He doesn’t care anything about the middle-class or the lower-class people,” another former employee says of Mr Romney.
Bain’s $5 million (€3.95 million) investment in Ampad yielded more than $100 million in profit.
In a statement responding to the video, Bain protested that Ampad declared bankruptcy four years after Bain sold it.
Since the Bain advertisements started, US vice-president Joe Biden has earned a reputation as the “attack dog” for the Obama campaign. In Youngstown, Ohio, a steel town that has one of the highest unemployment rates in the US, Mr Biden said Mr Romney’s executives “got to play by a separate set of rules”.
In the case of the steel plant Bain purchased in Kansas, Mr Biden continued, “not everybody got hurt. The top 30 executives walked away with $9 million. And Romney and his partners walked away with at least $12 million.”
Private equity firms are “a healthy part of the free market”, Mr Obama said. “There are folks who do good work in that area . . . but understand that their priority is to maximise profits. And that’s not always going to be good for communities or businesses or workers.”
The Romney campaign received an unexpected boost when three Obama acolytes with close ties to Wall Street, two of them African Americans, criticised the Bain attack advertisements. Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, told NBC: “I have to just say, from a very personal level, I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity.”
New Jersey’s state pension funds are invested with “companies like Bain Capital”, he noted.
Mr Booker seemed to qualify his remarks, saying he thought Mr Romney’s record at Bain was “fair game”. But that was largely forgotten as the Republican Party launched an “I stand with Cory” online petition and the Romney campaign posted a “Bain Backfire” web video.
In a Washington Post-ABC News poll published yesterday, 52 per cent of respondents said Mr Obama had a “better personal character to serve as president”, while 39 per cent preferred Mr Romney.
The Romney campaign seems to have realised the dangers of vicious attacks on a president who is personally popular, and has taken a softer tack in an advertisement to be released today. Using actors, it emphasises disappointment, unkept promises, runaway government spending and the downward mobility of American families.
Mr Romney has claimed for almost a year that he is better qualified to turn the economy around than Mr Obama. Yet the same poll showed the two presidential candidates tied on their ability to handle the economy, at 47 per cent.
It also showed that Mr Romney’s experience at Bain was seen as neutral, with equal numbers of respondents citing it as a reason to vote for or against him.
In terms of voter intentions, the two men are virtually tied. But maths in the electoral college, which will decide the election, are to Mr Obama’s advantage.
Based on its calculation of the probable line-up among states, the Real Clear Politics website estimates that Mr Obama is only 43 votes shy of winning the 270 electoral votes required to secure re-election, while Mr Romney would need 100 more votes to defeat him.
