Dems use conservatives’ words against Romney in attacks
A political action committee supporting President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign has rounded up soundbites from presidential also-rans for a video it released on Tuesday hitting likely nominee Mitt Romney’s record as a private equity executive, the latest in a stream of attacks on Romney’s time in high finance.
The video comes a day after the Obama campaign stepped up criticism of Romney’s business background and fended off attacks from Republicans and from within its own ranks that its anti-Bain barbs are unnecessarily needling an entire industry.
“If Romney makes business experience the central reason for his campaign, voters have every right to question the many deals where Romney made millions while workers lost their jobs and promised benefits,” said former White House aide Bill Burton, who heads up the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action.
The roughly two-minute video, “Republicans vs. Romney’s Record,” features some of the most strident conservative voices to have waged failed presidential runs.
Texas Governor Rick Perry is shown calling the brand of capitalism Romney practiced at Bain Capital “vulture capitalism,” in which investors see a struggling company, “swoop in,” and “pick the carcass clean.”
“There is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failure and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business,” said Perry, whose bid for the White House fizzled months ago after a series of missteps and verbal gaffes.
Ad connecting Romney to company in Medicare fraud case “mostly true”
Last week a public workers union launched a television ad that raised an old question about presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s connection to Damon Corp, a company that defrauded Medicare by the millions while under the watch of Romney’s private equity firm Bain Capital. Thursday, the Super PAC Winning Our Future, which supports Romney’s Republican rival Newt Gingrich released the trailer for a campaign video titled “Blood Money” that echoes the same criticism.
The ad created by AFSCME equates Romney with Florida Governor Rick Scott whose approval rating is one of the lowest in the country. Scott is the former CEO of the hospital chain Columbia/HCA that became embroiled in a Medicare fraud case in the late 1990s.
A narrator speaking over black and white photos of Romney says he was director of Damon Corp, which was later fined $100 million for medicare fraud. Romney’s image morphs into that of Rick Scott as the narrator asks, “Corporate greed … Medicare fraud. Sound familiar?”
PolitiFact, a fact-checking site run by the Tampa Bay Times, called the ad “Mostly True.” Although it is true Romney was head of Damon Corporation, which did defraud Medicare by the millions, Romney was never personally implicated, the site says.
See the video from AFSCME here, from PolitiFact’s site:
See the trailer for Winning Our Future’s campaign video (much more dramatic) here, from their Youtube page:
@Sensibility
The Tampa Bay Times, formerly the St. Pete Times, writes for a notoriously conservative base. Politifact draws ire from both sides because they are critical of everyone. For example, their “Lie of the Year” this year was from the Democratic Party (it was from Republicans the two years prior). They are providing unbiased independent analysis when all the other news agencies are afraid to.
Gingrich sheds doubt on Romney’s business past
Newt Gingrich raised questions about Mitt Romney’s private sector past at two back-to-back debates over the weekend in New Hampshire, returning to an allegation he made last month that Mitt Romney made a fortune at Bain by “bankrupting companies and laying off employees.”
A new report by the New York Times, Gingrich said, showed that Bain, the private equity firm co-founded by Romney, had “looted” one particular company (although it turns out he was actually referring to a Reuters story, written by Andy Sullivan and Greg Roumeliotis, about Bain’s investment in a Kansas City steel mill).
At Saturday night’s debate, moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Gingrich to address a new, “very scathing attack” by a pro-Gingrich Super PAC against Romney’s work at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he co-founded. The video, Stephanopoulos said, calls Romney’s “tenure ‘a story of greed’…saying that Bain made spectacular profits by ‘stripping American businesses of assets, selling everything to the highest bidder and often killing jobs for big financial rewards.’”
Gingrich said that while he is “very much for free enterprise,” he’s less “enamored of a Wall Street model where you can flip companies, you can go in and have leveraged buyouts, you can basically take out all the money, leaving behind the workers.”
“Is that the Bain model?” asked Stephanopoulos.
“You have to look at the New York Times coverage of one particular company,” he said.
This is Romney’s idea of free markets. Profits before people.
Got to love the right, ATTACK, ATTACK and ATTACK some more, then when the other side starts using the same tactics, it is ‘unfair’ and ‘negative’. What a bunch of cry babies, if you cant take it do not dish it out.