Obama's campaign strategy against Mitt Romney in attacking Romney's former work for Bain Capital is backfiring as polling, according to CBS News, is seeing Romney's, not Obama's, approval ratings rise.
In the past two weeks, the Obama campaign has rolled out several attacks on Romney and his time at Bain Capital.
"He's running for president, and if he's going to run the country the way he ran our business, I wouldn't want him there," a steelworker says in one ad.
But so far, it's not working.
Instead of a bump in public opinion for the president, recent polls show Romney's approval ratings on the rise -- and sharply so in the key swing state of Florida.
Adding to the growing list of Democrats who have criticized Obama for his attacks which have come across as attacks against Capitalism, Lanny Davis, Obama supporter, offers criticisms against both the GOP and Barack Obama, while proving that Obama's campaign ad attacks against Romney's Bain record is "somewhat misleading:
The Obama anti-Romney Bain Capital campaign ad focused on a Kansas City steel company, GS Technologies, which was on the verge of bankruptcy when Bain Capital purchased it in 1993 for $80 million. GS went bankrupt in 2001, with several hundred workers losing their jobs. The ad featured several of them blaming Romney and Bain for the lost jobs, but it omitted several facts, such as:
Mitt Romney had left Bain Capital two years before bankruptcy had been declared.
The head of Bain at the time of the GS bankruptcy decision is now a major Obama fundraiser.
Bain invested another $100 million in plant modernization and four years later the company reportedly had reached more than $1 billion in revenues.
After the company went bankrupt in 2001, the president of the plant’s union didn’t blame Bain but rather, cheap foreign imports. “We can’t compete against the steel imports that are being sold under cost,” he said.
It’s difficult to argue, even if you are a partisan Obama supporter, as I am, that this ad is not at least somewhat misleading.
Obama planned these Bain Capital attacks against Romney as early as January 2012, as evidenced by earlier campaign's claims that Washington Post's The Fact Checker rated him with three Pinocchios, at that time, for making.
Perhaps it is inevitable that once Obama took office he would be in the so-called "presidential bubble", surrounded by staff and advisers but no longer able to keep his finger on the pulse of America, no longer able to connect with the electorate, but someone should remind him of the brutal GOP primary battle and how Bain was used and how those attacks failed, and Romney came out on the other side, for the very same reasons these attacks by Obama, as CBS News so aptly described it, aren't "sticking."
Americans have been here, we have done that, we have the T-shirts and the bumper stickers and we have moved on and are focused back on the economy, jobs and the federal deficit.
Or perhaps Obama just doesn't want to talk about the economy, jobs and the federal deficit.....
"I will be held accountable. I’ve got four years and … A year from now, I think people are going to see that we’re starting to make some progress, but there’s still going to be some pain out there … If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition."--- Barack Obama, February 2009.
[WATCH]
Related:
Team Obama Just Endorsed Mitt Romney As President
Video- Obama's Big Bain Backfire: Bain Created More Jobs Than Obama's Stimulus Has