President Barack Obama’s latest campaign ad was reviewed Thursday by the Washington Post and earned a negative four out of four Pinocchios on its accuracy rating.
In the ad, the voiceover claims that Romney was a “corporate raider” and that at various times, including during his tenure as governor, he shipped jobs to China, Mexico and India.
According to The Fact Checker, “corporate raider” is a precise term in the world of finance where an investor sees an undervalued asset and forces management to spin off assets, take the company private, or break it up.
But according to Wall Street veteran and former Obama auto czar Steven Rattner, “Bain Capital is not now, nor has it ever been, some kind of Gordon Gekko-like, fire-breathing corporate raider that slashed and burned companies, immolating jobs wherever they appear in its path.”
The job outsourcing claims rest mainly on a bill that Romney vetoed which would have prohibited Massachusetts from contracting with companies that outsourced the state’s work to other countries.
But, as The Fact Checker notes, both the liberal Boston Globe and conservative Boston Herald urged Romney to veto the amendment because it did not protect state jobs and it “had the potential of costing our citizens a lot more money.”
To call that decision “shipping jobs overseas” obscures Romney’s decision and denies the Democratic state legislature’s involvement in refusing to override the veto, the review notes.
The Post concludes that “on just about every level, this ad is misleading, unfair and untrue, from the use of ‘corporate raider’ to its examples of alleged outsourcing. Simply repeating the same debunked claims won’t make them any more correct.”