Democrats Unleash Bain Assault On Mitt Romney — With The Help Of Newt Gingrich
Democrats Unleash Bain Assault On Mitt Romney — With The Help Of Newt Gingrich
Benjy Sarlin-January 10, 2012, 5:19 AM336834
BOSTON, MA — It wasn’t meant to be this way. For months Democrats had planned to wait until Mitt Romney won the GOP nomination and then they would unleash their secret weapon. Well, not-so-secret weapon, really: it’s something that most observers say cost Romney his campaign against Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1994, and has bedeviled him in every campaign since.
The weapon is one short and unfortunately homophonic word: Bain. As in Bain Capital, the corporate management firm Romney helped to found and made his millions out of, raking in almost comically huge sums of money often even as the bought-up companies shrank, shriveled and shuttered.
Mitt Romney’s campaign has long been prepared to face tough attacks on Bain Capital’s history of layoffs. But what’s been a persistent headache has swollen into an aching migraine. And one of the people leading the charge tells TPM that the person most responsible is typically no friend of the Democrats at all; in fact, it’s Newt Gingrich.
Randy Johnson is front and center of a campaign by the National Democrats to call attention to downsizing at Bain. He lost his job during a Bain bout of “downsizing,” and he’s currently being ferried around the country by Democrats trying to put a human face on the story. He’s not the whole of the story; the campaign has become a many pronged one: on Monday, for instance, the Dems put out their first video on the topic, challenging Romney over his oft-cited statistic that he created 100,000 jobs at Bain. Meanwhile, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has taken to calling him a “job cremator.” But Johnson has become something of a star.
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