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(Image source: Newsy)
BY FERDOUS AL-FARUQUE
With less than four months to go before election day, the 2012 presidential race is starting
to get a little dirty. The Obama campaign is accusing Mitt Romney of shutting down American
factories and shipping jobs overseas when he was at Bain Capital. The Romney campaign,
on the other hand, is accusing the president of being untruthful.
BarackObamaDotCom:“Mitt Romney’s companies were pioneers in outsourcing US jobs to low
wage countries. He supports tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.”
MittRomney: “When a president doesn’t tell the truth how can we trust him to lead?
The Obama outsourcing attacks: ‘Misleading, unfair and untrue.’ There was ‘no evidence’
that Mitt Romney shipped jobs overseas.”
Over the past week, the Obama campaign has ratcheted up attacks questioning Mitt Romney’s
departure from Bain Capital. Romney maintains he left the firm in 1999 while government
filings show he was a managing member until 2002. But Romney’s camp maintains the candidate
didn’t participate in actually running the company after 1999.
After Romney went on the airwaves Friday to say the attack ads were "beneath the dignity
of the presidency and his campaign," supporters from both camps took to the Sunday shows to
defend and attack each other’s candidate. A senior Romney advisor, Ed Gillespie, said
Romney “retired retroactively” from Bain.
Gillespie: “He took a leave of absence from Bain to go and run the Olympics in Salt Lake
City... It is standard though to, while you’re on leave, to sign those documents for the
SEC.”
The subject dominated Sunday talk.
Durbin: “The bottom line is this. The outsourcing of jobs by Bain Capital to low-wage countries
is an embarrassment to Mitt Romney. He’s trying to distance himself from his own company
that made millions of dollars for him.”
Madden: “I think that’s a very troubling place for the country to be: when we have
our president right now who’s not willing to talk about what he’d do to fix the economy
and who’s only interested in attacking Governor Romney.”
Rove: “There’s a way out of the trap which is to refute and flip. It’s to say this
is unfair, untrue, third party sources say this is wrong.”
And as both sides continue to go on the attack, CBS Face the Nation’s Bob Schieffer found
himself right in the middle of it.
The Romney camp featured him in its latest attack ad saying, “Whatever happened to
hope and change?” The host took to his show Sunday to distance himself from the ad.
Schieffer: "I have no connection to the Romney campaign. This was done without our permission...
" Rich: “I hope you get residuals.”
Schieffer: “I’ll get some blowback, that’s for sure.”
Schieffer says the clip came from an interview with Obama advisor David Axelrod, and that
he’d posed it as a question, not a statement.