Obama Campaign: Boy, that Mitt Romney's Quite the Buck-Passing Felon, Huh?

| July 12, 2012 | 4 Replies

If you turn on the news today, you’ll probably hear some version of a story about Mitt Romney and whether he really did fire a bajillion people while he was at Bain Capital. See, the Obama campaign really wants you to believe that Romney is some horrible real-life hybrid of the Monopoly Man, and Snidely Whiplash who spent decades tying poor workers to the railroad tracks to be run over by the Outsource Express. The campaign made a couple commercials that somehow managed not to include the lonesome whistle of a distant oncoming locomotive and were so laughably wrong that the normally-biased fact checkers of the MSM had to call shenanigans on them.

Normally, that would have been the end of things. The President tried to slick a couple attack ads past us and got busted. That’s politics and I imagine it happenes at least once in every major campaign. But the Obama team just can’t leave well enough alone. The Boston Globe, in its role as campaign stenographer, ran a major story Tuesday in which it suggested Mitt Romney lied about when he left Bain Capital.

Okay. Let me sum up the story so you can see just what a silly ball of fluff it is. Mitt Romney ran Bain Capital until 1999, when he left to take over the Winter Olympics in Utah. That gig happened fairly quickly, and he didn’t know how long he’d be there, so Mitt left Bain on a more or less temporary basis. He kept ownership and his various titles with the company, but all the operational stuff he had done before 1999 went to other people inside the company because he was spending 112 hours a week on the Olympics. In short, he took a leave of absence. He signed the various legal forms and such the titles required, but he wasn’t doing the work. Four years later (give or take) in 2002, when he was done with the Olympics, he decided to make his leave of absence permanent and resigned the positions he still held on paper.

That’s it. That’s the story. Mitt Romney took a temporary leave of absence that became permanent. While he was gone, he still held the titles of President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Bain Capital but he didn’t make any of the business decisions, which included the instances of evil outsourcing cited by the Obama administration.

Simple enough, right? Not if you’re Stephanie Cutter, deputy campaign manager of the Obama campaign and head of the horribly-misnamed “Truth Team”. This is her response when the Romney campaign explained again exactly what happened.

“Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony, or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investment,” Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter asserted.

“If he was lying to the American people,” she added. “then that’s a real character and trust issue that the American people need to take very seriously.”

The Obama campaign’s contention, then, is this: because Mitt Romney kept his titles with Bain, and fulfilled the barest of legal obligations while he did so, he is either a liar or a felon. I’ll give you a minute to pick your jaw up off your desk.

This, by the way, isn’t just the opinion of one wildly out of control campaign operative. It is the position of the Democratic Party, who tweeted this today.

So there you go. Mitt Romney is a big Blamey McBlamerson and a big fat liar who just might have committed a bigger, fatter felony.

Or, you know, not.

 

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Category: The 2012 Horse Race

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