The Obama campaign is out with a new two-minute attack ad, hitting Mitt Romney on his past at Bain Capital. The ad, set to run in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Ohio, Virginia and Colorado, plays up the “vulture capitalism” angle. “It was like a vampire,” says a former GS Steel worker named Joe Cobb. “They came in and sucked the life out of us.”
The Romney campaign is expected to push back aggressively on what they view as a major distraction from the president’s disastrous economic record. It shouldn’t be terribly hard. The bankruptcy and layoffs occurred in 2001, two years after Romney quit running the day-to-day activities of Bain (in order to head the Salt Lake City Olympics.)
Much of this line of attack has already been debunked by, of all outlets, the Washington Post.
On May 4, in response to a similar attack, the Post wrote:
Notice a problem with the last two examples? The outsourcing occurred in 2000 and 2001. Romney left Bain in early 1999. We’ve gone over this problem with the Obama campaign before, awarding three Pinocchios to a January memo the team released blaming Romney for job losses and bad deals that took place after the former executive had stopped working for Bain.
Indeed, this is a rehash of a rehash of a rehash. In January, the Post awarded the Obama campaign “three Pinocchios” for a similar attack, noting that “Romney’s record when he was running Bain is certainly fair game, but any deals made after 1999 just shouldn’t count.”
(Interestingly, the Washington Post stories on this topic now only appear in the print version; they don’t show up otherwise.)