Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
It seems that the Willard "Mittens" Romney campaign has their knickers in a twist over the Obama campaign ad "Steel" released earlier today about the vulture capitalism of Bain Capital.
You will recall that In its effort to sell Mitt Romney as someone who understands the economy and knows how to create jobs, one of his campaign’s early talking points was that he helped create 100,000 jobs during his tenure at Bain Capital. Yeah, not true. Romney Campaign Massively Downgrades The Number Of Jobs It Claims He Created From 100,000 To ‘Thousands’:
The campaign repeated the claim throughout the primary, despite a glaring lack of evidence to support it (even Sarah Palin doubted it).
Romney eventually stopped repeating the talking point, which advisers had difficulty defending under pressure, and now it seems Romney has completely Etch A Sketched the number and severely lowered the number of jobs Romney is supposed to have created at Bain.
BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller reports that, in the wake of the Obama campaign’s new ad attacking Romney’s record at Bain, the “new Romney jobs math” is significantly more modest than the old. This time, the campaign is asserting that Romney created a meager and vague “thousands of jobs” at Bain and “tens of thousands” of jobs as governor of Massachusetts.
That's known as "weasel words" in the business -- purposefully vague so you can't be pinned down on an exact number. I call it "Mitt Math."
This is nothing less than an admission from the Romney campaign that their 100,000 jobs claim was entirely bogus, and acceptance that Romney created vastly fewer jobs than he claimed he had just a few months ago. It’s a welcome return to reality, but calls into question any piece of evidence the campaign puts forward.
Meanwhile, even the “thousands of jobs” figure should be suspect, as the evidence the campaign offers to support it is an editorial from the right-wing Washington Examiner endorsing Romney. [Not a credible or reliable source.]
And his assertion on his record as governor also fails to include the context that his state was 47th out of 50 on job creation.
Also today, the Romney campaign released its own web video today profiling Steel Dynamics, one of the companies that Bain invested in. The ad implies that the plant would not have been built without Romney’s assistance. Like his taking credit for rescuing Detroit, Mitt Romney is again taking credit for the work of many others. New Romney Video Touts Steel Mill That Benefited From Government Largesse:
Steele Dynamics “almost never got started,” the narrator says. “When others shied away, Mitt Romney’s private-sector leadership team stepped in.”
But the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported at the time (via Nexis), that Bain was just one of eight financiers for the project — hardly the lone white knight:
Financing to build the plant is coming from the Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh, NBD Bank, Fort Wayne National Bank, Lincoln National Life Insurance Co., the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Germany and the Paris Bank. Capital and Bain Capital are also investors.
And while the video touts Romney’s “private-sector” team, the company was successful thanks, in part, to big government subsidies and grants — $37 million from the state of Indiana and DeKalb County. And as the Los Angeles Times reported in January of this year, the county even raised taxes on residents to help fund the mill:
The county promised $23.4 million in property tax abatements and tax increment finance bonds, as well as a new income tax to generate economic development funds. The latter was required by the state, which shelled out another $13.6 million in tax credits, energy grants, workforce training and funds for roads.
A new quarter-percent tax on DeKalb County residents financed infrastructure improvements such as roads and railroad exchanges that benefited Steel Dynamics.
* * *
[The] Romney-backed Steel Dynamics enjoyed government largesse on the local level. As the LA Times noted, “The story of Bain and Steel Dynamics illustrates how Romney, during his business career, made avid use of public-private partnerships, something that many conservatives consider to be ‘corporate welfare.’”
Is this all Romney has got? is this the best example he could come up with after having years to prepare for this anticipated line of attack? Weak.
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