Bill Clinton — the man who was such a thorn in Barack Obama’s side during the 2008 Democratic primaries — has become one of the current President’s most important supporters this time around. All the more significant, then, that Clinton has added his name to the list of Democrats who have voiced concern at one of Team Obama’s attacks on Mitt Romney.
For a while now, the Obama campaign has been trying to make Romney’s investment career at Bain Capital, which he founded, as a reason for voters not to back the presumptive Republican nominee. They’ve hit him with the stories of workers who lost their jobs at companies taken over by Bain — including this powerful video about steel workers in Kansas City.
But some Democrats are uneasy about attacking Romney’s private equity work in this way. ‘It’s nauseating the public,’ Newark Mayor Cory Booker said a couple of weeks ago. ‘Stop attacking private equity’ (Although he later put out a YouTube video saying Bain Capital’s fair game). Yesterday morning, Massschusetts Governor Deval Patrick called Bain ‘a perfectly fine company’ and said ‘I think the Bain strategy has been distorted in some of the public discussions’. And then, last night, Bill Clinton told CNN ‘I don’t think we should get into the position where we say this is good work, this is bad’:
This sort of friendly fire heavily undermines a line of attack that Team Obama thought would be very fruitful. So you can expect Obama and his friends to turn their focus away from Romney’s private sector record and towards his economic record as Governor. They’re fond of pointing out that, when Romney was Governor, Massachusetts slipped to 47th of the 50 states in terms of job creation. It’s little coincidence that, today, the Obama campaign has released this compilation of Romney being attacked by his fellow Republicans on exactly that subject:
Jonathan Jones
Clinton hurts Obama
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