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Open Thread: Romney Campaign “Fed Up” With Attacks on Bain

Be afraid, Obama campaign, be very afraid! You’ve really gotten under Romney’s skin with your nasty attacks on Bain Capital. Buzzfeed reports:

The Romney campaign will begin to aggressively push back against President Obama’s accusations that the Republican was an “outsourcing pioneer” today, a source privy to the the campaign’s strategy told BuzzFeed.

In a conference call Monday morning, senior staff said Romney’s surrogates would stop shying away from the word “lie” in responding to Democrats’ attacks on his business record, and plan to go on TV to call Obama a “liar,” the source said.

“They are very fed up with these attacks,” said the source.

Wow! Now that’s scary. They’re going to call Obama a liar? That should knock the President right out of the running, don’t you think? The Romneyites are still upset about that Washington Post story from June 21 that characterized Bain as a “pioneer” in outsourcing.

In response, Romney surrogates are going to make the case that most of the offshoring happened after the Republican left Bain, and that much of it was simply to help firms sell products overseas.

To spread the message, the source said, the campaign is going to start circulating a document to press that compiles “presidential falsehoods and exaggerations.”

Yikes! I don’t know if Obama can survive such a powerful pushback!

Meanwhile the Obama campaign has moved on from the Bain issue and begun attacking Romney about his secrecy about his personal finances, based on the Vanity Fair article by Nicholas Shaxon. Obama’s surrogates were out all weekend hammering Romney on his secrecy about his multiple secret investments in offshore tax havens, his Swiss bank account, and his failure to release more than one year’s tax returns.

I guess about three weeks from now, the Romney campaign will gear up to fight back on these latest attacks by the Obama campaign. Of course by then there probably will be new revelations about Romney. I’m betting pretty soon we’ll be hearing more about how Romney never really left Bain in 1999, as he claims.

Comments

29 responses to “Open Thread: Romney Campaign “Fed Up” With Attacks on Bain”

  1. dakinikat Avatar

    Ralph put this link to Krugman up in the morning thread. It’s worth posting here because it’s precisely on point.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/opinion/krugman-mitts-gray-areas.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

    Put it this way: Has there ever before been a major presidential candidate who had a multimillion-dollar Swiss bank account, plus tens of millions invested in the Cayman Islands, famed as a tax haven?

    And then there’s his Individual Retirement Account. I.R.A.’s are supposed to be a tax-advantaged vehicle for middle-class savers, with annual contributions limited to a few thousand dollars a year. Yet somehow Mr. Romney ended up with an account worth between $20 million and $101 million.

    There are legitimate ways that could have happened, just as there are potentially legitimate reasons for parking large sums of money in overseas tax havens. But we don’t know which if any of those legitimate reasons apply in Mr. Romney’s case — because he has refused to release any details about his finances. This refusal to come clean suggests that he and his advisers believe that voters would be less likely to support him if they knew the truth about his investments.

    The real thing is that it compares George Romney’s openness and income reported and basic job function to his son’s. BIG contrast.

    Even the WSJ says that Mitt’s not going to be able to dodge these questions.

    AND, remember, McCain chose Quitterella after reviewing 10 years of Romney Tax Returns.

    1. bostonboomer Avatar
      bostonboomer

      Yes, but Mitt won’t address those issues for another three weeks, as I point out in my post. He’s still dealing with the Bain attacks.

      If he continues to be three weeks behind on each set of Obama attacks, the right wingers are going to have conniption fits.

      1. dakinikat Avatar

        He can’t explain anything clearly and cogently. It looks like all this anger surrounds his inability to worm his way out of explaining something.

      2. RalphB Avatar
        RalphB

        He won’t even release the names of his campaign bundlers. He’s not going to release any information at all, unless he’s forced into it.

      3. bostonboomer Avatar
        bostonboomer

        You’re right. That’s a very good column by Krugman.

    2. bostonboomer Avatar
      bostonboomer

      “Struggling” is a bit over the top when the campaign raised $71,000,000 last month. Frankly, all this money on both sides is sickening. Raising $106,000,000 to destroy the middle class isn’t something to be proud of, IMO. But that’s just me.

  2. bostonboomer Avatar
    bostonboomer

    Obama proposes extending the Bush tax cuts on people who make less than $250,000. Romney calls it a “massive tax increase” that won’t help the middle class.

    Only 2% of Americans would be affected by ending the Bush tax cuts on high earners.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/mitt-romney-middle-class-tax-cut-wont-help-middle-class/2012/07/09/gJQAXtmJYW_blog.html

    1. RalphB Avatar
      RalphB

      I think we can probably mark that as another Romney lie. Personally, I think the last thing Willard should want is to start the “liar” games since he’s the most prolific I’ve ever seen. That could come back to bite him big time.

  3. Pilgrim Avatar
    Pilgrim

    Obama supporters probably should be a little concerned, and many of them are.

    An article by Lawrence Solomon in National Post posits that there’s only one explanation for the concomitant big drop in donations to Obama and big haul by Romney, and it’s a major shift of Jewish money. Jewish contributors have been very big donors to Democrats. Very, very, very big, way out of proportion to their fraction of the population.

    More or less amusingly, Solomon says, Obama told a gathering of rabbis that he knows more about Judaism than any other president in history.

    Financially, he’s struggling now even though his campaign had initially boasted they would scale the billion dollar heights. It’s Romney that looks to be on track for that.

    1. northwestrain Avatar
      northwestrain

      So 0bama wanted unlimited campaign spending in 2008 and didn’t take any fed campaign funds. So now this year — the other guy can probably out spend 0bama.

      Seems like many of us predicted this scenario in 2008.

      1. Pilgrim Avatar
        Pilgrim

        Yes. And Obama pitifully must needs implore people to send him their wedding gift and birthday money.

        1. dakinikat Avatar

          Karma’s a wonderful bitch, isn’t she?

    2. RalphB Avatar
      RalphB

      On the bright side of that fundraising gap is if/when Obama is reelected he won’t owe Wall St or most of the other people I detest a damn thing. That could mean a very different second term.

  4. Barbara J Avatar
    Barbara J

    Gingrich tried the same attack and failed miserably. Obama smacks of desperation trying a failed strategy. It’s all he has. He’s the worst president in modern times and I hope he loses by a landslide.

    1. bostonboomer Avatar
      bostonboomer

      Gingrich attacked Obama for ragging on Bain? That’s news to me.

      When you say “modern times,” how many years are you referring to? The worst president of my lifetime has to be George W. Bush–after all, he and his policies caused the Great Recession. He would be followed by Nixon, Reagan, Carter, Bush the elder, and Ford. Obama is way down the list of worst presidents in modern times unless you were born yesterday.

      1. northwestrain Avatar
        northwestrain

        Yes bush was the “let it happen” worst Prez ever. He really did out do good old dad.

        GWB probably set the standard for worst. His whole life he got by on his last name.

    2. RalphB Avatar
      RalphB

      Please. The one place Gingrich attacked Romney with Bain was in SC and he cleaned his clock. He was then shamed out of it by the big money but it even worked for Newt.

  5. RalphB Avatar
    RalphB

    Maybe this has been done to death but OMG this is hilarious. Those Hamptons Romney donors are not exactly the elite it seems.

    Pizza Rat Publicist Simply Does Not Care For Your Class War

    Amongst the Masters Of The Universe, who are THE ENGINE OF THIS ECONOMY that Nobama is trying to dronekill with his socialist taxes, were the lovely Zambrellis on New York; a couple who once raised money and voted for Obama until he betrayed them by talking for three whole years about raising taxes on rich people. Impeach!
    […]
    And what is Michael Zambrelli’s greatest achievement in life? Well, he is the man who helped to rebrand Chuck E. Cheese from a teenager forced into wearing a moth-eaten rat costume reeking of sweat, old cheese and minimum wage while entertaining packs of feral children eating slightly warm cardboard and ketchup-flavored pizza when they’re not cavorting in one of those Ball Pits of Childhood Diseases into a backwards-hat-wearing “hip, electric-guitar-playing rock star” just like Scott Stapp but with less Jesus.

    1. bostonboomer Avatar
      bostonboomer

      These are the “job creators” who drive “the engine of the economy?” I don’t think there is any amount of mocking of these people that would be too much.

      1. northwestrain Avatar
        northwestrain

        True that — and thanks for the snorting sort of laugh your remark evoked!!!

  6. The Rock Avatar
    The Rock

    Hey Dak!

    I know this is a bit OT, but I just saw this story and you are the one person I trust on economic issues. I remember him making the housing prediction, but does this prediction sound like it is on the up and up?

    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/roubini-perfect-storm-unfolding-now-104907590.html

    Hillary 2012

    1. dakinikat Avatar

      He makes money saying things like that … I’m skeptical.

  7. propertius Avatar
    propertius

    The Mormons I know would never use the word “hell”. 😉

    1. dakinikat Avatar

      The Mormons I grew up with could raise it better than any one I ever knew … they had all the best drugs in town.

  8. List of X Avatar

    Seeing how Mitt Romney and his stuff constantly blame Obama for the things that are much more relevant to Romney (“liar”, “out of touch”, “no jobs plan”, “Obamacare”), it’s probably just a matter or time until Romney will claim that Obama has sheltered millions in Switzerland and Caymans

    1. northwestrain Avatar
      northwestrain

      That is an old GOP scam isn’t it.

      1. List of X Avatar

        It’s a psychological defense mechanism called “projection”

      2. bostonboomer Avatar
        bostonboomer

        It’s also a deliberate strategy, pioneered by Karl Rove.

  9. blackhorsearmy Avatar
    blackhorsearmy

    The Obama campaign needs to keep hammering away at Romney on Bain, on flip flopping, on his job record as Bain, his draft dodging! Obama 2012!!