July 14, 2012 06:42 PM UTC

New Obama Ad Steps Up Bain Capital Attack on Romney in Colorado

• 0 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

AP reports:

President Barack Obama is keeping up a drumbeat of skepticism over Mitt Romney’s insistence – displayed in a blitz of TV interviews – that he stepped down from his private equity firm years earlier than federal records indicate…

His re-election campaign released an ad that repeated its allegation that Romney’s Bain Capital shipped American jobs to China and Mexico; that Romney has personal wealth in investments in Switzerland, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands; and that as governor of Massachusetts, he outsourced state jobs to India.

“Mitt Romney’s not the solution. He’s the problem,” Obama’s latest ad says as it plays video of Romney awkwardly singing “America the Beautiful.”

The ad was set to run in the battleground states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The ad, targeting Romney’s vast personal wealth, comes as Democrats – and some Republicans – call for Romney to release tax returns going back several years. Romney has said anew that he won’t go beyond releasing his 2010 tax records and, before the election, his 2011 taxes.

Mitt Romney’s news channel blitz yesterday in self-defense against the accusation that he misled voters and the media about the date of his departure from Bain Capital doesn’t appear to have slowed the controversy at all. Politico has more reporting on Romney’s defense:

An animated and sometimes irritated Romney conceded that he continued to nominally head Bain Capital – the subject of relentless attacks against him by Democrats – after 1999 and had the option to return to managing the daily operations of the firm when the Olympics was over. He also stuck to his guns regarding his tax returns, saying he would release two years’ worth (2011 and 2010) and no more.

“I was the owner of an entity that is filing those information – that information, but I had no role whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999, not that that would have been a problem, to have said that I was with the firm beyond that, but I simply wasn’t,” Romney said on CNN.

On Friday night, Romney’s answers had already proved unsatisfactory to the Obama campaign.

“The Obama campaign is not satisfied with Romney’s answer. They still want to see Romney’s tax returns as well as minutes from Bain meetings,” NBC White House correspondent Kristen Welker reported. From Obama’s camp, Welker said: “We expect the American people would want to see more information.”

Although the defensive chaff being put up by Romney’s surrogates via conservative media outlets is pretty heavy, in part reflecting the seriousness of the allegations, this discrepancy has the ability to heavily damage Romney’s campaign with many voters–and Romney has failed so far to substantively respond. Even if there’s no formal legal violation found with Romney’s statement on federal disclosure forms that he “left” Bain Capital in 1999, SEC documents indicating otherwise will leave a huge credibility gap that Romney can’t close without releasing information he has pledged not to release.

The damage is aggravated by specific denials the Romney campaign has made to attacks from both Obama and his GOP primary rivals about layoffs and outsourcing of jobs after 1999–such as GST Steel in Kansas City in 2001, which Romney denies responsibility for based solely on his claim that he left Bain Capital before that plant was closed.

In short, it’s Romney’s self-made pickle. He’s the only one who can end it–unless he can’t.