Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital dominated the campaign trail on Monday, as rival campaigns released dueling ads about the private equity firm the likely GOP nominee founded.
Following a Newt Gingrich-style tactic, President Obama's campaign started today's ad war over Romney’s role in a now-defunct steel plant in Kansas City, Missouri. Romney's company bought out GST Steel in 1993 and declared bankruptcy in 2001. In the two-minute ad airing in five swing states, former factory workers compare Romney to a vampire, running a company that "came in and sucked the life out" of them after rounds of layoffs and lost pensions.
"This is about whether the lessons and values Romney drew from his time as a buyout specialist," said deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter told reporters on a conference call. "What those values are — what they tell us about what type of president Mitt Romney would be, and whether the voters want that in the Oval Office.”
Romney camp's argued he left the firm two years before the plant went under. To offset Obama's ad, Team Romney released a their own video today highlighting Steel Dynamics as "the perfect entrepreneurial story."
"We welcome the Obama campaign's attempt to pivot back to jobs and a discussion of their failed record,” said Romney’s spokeswoman Andrea Saul in a statement. "Mitt Romney helped create more jobs in his private sector experience and more jobs as governor of Massachusetts than President Obama has for the entire nation."
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78% of Bain's take over of failing companies have been succesful restructructuring workouts with new capitazation. This failing steel mill in Missouri was put back on a path of successfull stabilization and growth by Bain Capital for an eight year period after its takeover and restructuring in 1993. However, Romney was not at Bain Capital for all of those ten years as he had left to manage the failing problem plagued Winter Olympics in 1999. The bankruptcy proceding for this stel ill enterprise in 2001 came about due to the recession of the dot.com bubble burst, and due also to the dunping of cheap Chinese steel on the market after the Clinton Administration provided China with "most favored nation" trade agreements without the necessary safeguards. it certainly wasn't the onlu US Steel manufacturing company to have severe difficulties faced with recession and disafvantageous Chinese trade practices. Rxamine the carnage in Allenstown and Pittsburg, PA in the 1990s and 2000s, for example.