posted at 2:11 pm on May 14, 2012 by Howard Portnoy
Team Obama has launched?a new attack ad against the Romney campaign?that threatens to come back and bite the president in his bid for re-election.
The ad,?The Washington Post?notes, focuses on GS Technologies, a Kansas City steel company that was purchased by Romney?s private equity firm Bain Capital and went bankrupt shortly afterward.
The commentary in the two-minute hit piece is provided predominantly by workers who lost their jobs, with occasional Romney sound bites interleaved. But the sound bite that is most likely to stay with viewers comes roughly 44 seconds in, when Jack Cobb, a veteran steelworker, refers to Bain as a ?vampire,? adding, ?they came in and sucked the life out of us.?
The ad is clearly intended to appeal to the blue-collar masses, people who the Obama campaign hopes understand little or nothing about venture capitalism (or ?vulture capitalism,? as Obama has styled it since Mitt Romney became the presumptive GOP nominee).
But the ad raises problems for Team Obama. One noted byThe Daily Caller?s Matt Lewis?is that the bankruptcy and layoffs occurred in 2001, two years after Romney had ceased running the day-to-day activities of Bain.
An even stickier problem is that the bulk of the Obamas? admittedly brief portfolio is invested in Chicago-based Northern Trust Corporation, a firm that has conducted itself in a manner that some might call ?vampire-like.? In 2003,?the company, which was a trustee of Enron?s 401(k) retirement plan, was accused of having knowingly failed to prevent employees? pensions from evaporating. A federal judge cleared the way for a lawsuit against Enron and Northern Trust for ?misleading company employees by encouraging and in some cases requiring them to hold Enron stock in their retirement accounts, at a time when the stock price plummeted from an artificially inflated level.? In the case, which commanded national attention, several former Enron executives were charged with manipulating the company?s financial results, ultimately driving it into bankruptcy.
The Obamas? 2011 federal tax return is here. Schedule B, which reports interest payments from Northern Trust is?here.
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