Obama Campaign, Mother Jones Demonize Romney for Successful Career

President Barack Obama’s campaign, again, tried to gin up outrage over Romney’s private equity past. The left-wing Mother Jones magazine released a 1985 video of Mitt Romney discussing Bain’s capital’s investment strategy of planning to “invest in startup companies and ongoing companies,” “help them realize their potential value,” and then “harvest them at a significant profit” five to eight years later.

The Obama campaign highlighted the video to mainstream media reporters and e-mailed them a statement from a worker at a company who lost his job when Bain merged his business with another.

Randy Johnson, a former Ampad worker, said in the statement, “Today’s video confirms what I and other workers fired by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital already know: that Romney’s business experience was never about creating jobs.”

Johnson also said “Romney’s own words prove that his focus was putting profits before people from the very beginning” and Romney’s “‘private sector’ experience or understanding of the ‘real economy’ are just empty words from a man desperately trying to rewrite the past in order to win an election.”

Earlier this year, Bain Capital defended its association with Ampad in a statement.

“Our control of Ampad ended in 1996, fully four years before it encountered financial difficulties due to overwhelming pressure from ‘big box’ retailers, declines in paper demand and intense foreign price pressures,” the statement said. “Despite political attacks that emphasize the few companies that have struggled, the facts are that during Bain Capital’s ownership, revenues grew in 80 percent of the more than 350 companies in which we have invested.”

Because Obama cannot run on his poor economy, the Obama campaign has tried to use any means necessary to demonize Romney’s private equity past at Bain, and left-wing publications like Mother Jones and the mainstream media have been more than willing to be complicit with the Obama administration in trying to help Obama. 

Romney’s comments were on a CD-ROM celebrating the 25th anniversary of Bain, and Mother Jones obtained the CD from a former Bain employee.