Obama Video Hits Romney Role in Ampad Bankruptcy The story of Ampad, a company acquired by Bain Capital in 1992 that later went bankrupt, was used successfully by Democrats 18 years ago to help derail Mitt Romney's run for a U.S. Senate seat from Massachusetts. Now, the Obama campaign is resurrecting the case to help keep Romney out of the White House. A new five-minute campaign web video aims to discredit Romney's key selling point of his candidacy - his business experience - featuring testimonials of workers laid off from a Marion, Ind., office products factory acquired by Ampad in 1994. Romney was CEO of Bain at the time. "Good paying job with good benefits. I loved the people I worked with. I thought I was settled in for life," says worker Jerry Rayburn who lost his job after Bain came in. Ampad went bankrupt in 2000, shedding a total of 1,500 jobs, according to the film. Bain profited $100 million from the deal. "He's just the opposite from Robin Hood," one worker says of Romney. With the Ampad video, the Obama campaign signals it is doubling down on the argument that Romney was a corporate raider more interested in amassing personal wealth than in creating jobs. Last week, Democrats focused on the case of Kansas City, Mo., steel company GST Steel, which was also acquired by Bain and later closed. GST was featured in a TV ad attacking Romney that ran in five battleground states. Obama campaign officials said Sunday that they are extending the ad buy in Ohio. Republicans and the Romney campaign have called the assault on Romney's business record "character assassination" and an affront to capitalism and private equity - the same industry that employs some of Obama's biggest donors, they note. "The purpose of the president's ads are not to describe success and failure, but to somehow to suggest that I'm not a good person or not a good guy," Romney said last week. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/TLatxTzVE4w" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> With American Pad & Paper (Ampad), Mitt Romney and his partners took a small but successful paper products business and merged it with other companies in the industry, piling up debt as they went. Ultimately, the company was unable to keep up with the interest payments on its debt and was forced into bankruptcy, but not before Romney and his partners were able to squeeze out more than $100 million for themselves.
Obama: Fighting Romney on economy âis what this campaign is going to be aboutâ In the spotlight of the world stage, President Barack Obama on Monday unapologetically defended his campaign's attacks on Mitt Romney's record at the private equity firm Bain Capital and vowed to keep up the onslaught all the way to November. "This issue is not a distraction," Obama defiantly declared at a press conference wrapping up a NATO summit in his hometown of Chicago. "This is what this campaign is going to be about." "If your main argument for how to grow the economy is 'I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,' then you're missing what this job is about," the president said, evidently relishing the opportunity to knock Romney. "It doesn't mean you weren't good at private equity, but that's not what my job is as president. My job is to take into account everybody, not just some. My job is to make sure that the country is growing not just now, but ten years from now and 20 years from now," he said. Obama's campaign has drawn fire, including from Democrats, for ads focused on the fate of GST, a Kansas City steel mill Bain bought in 1993 and put into bankruptcy in 2001. Romney left Bain in 1999, but maintained an interest in the firm.
The Bain attacks,they're working and will continue to work.Mitt bankrupted enough companies that the pres has enough to work with until November.BTW, his presidency has been a success