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Obama: Bain's fair game
President Barack Obama on Monday stood strongly behind his campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital, telling reporters in Chicago that his opponent’s business experience is fair game in the race for the White House.
“This is not a distraction. This is what this campaign is going to be about,” the president said at a press conference wrapping up the NATO Summit in his hometown.
“The reason this is relevant to the campaign is because my opponent, Governor Romney, his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business experience,” Obama said. “You know, he’s not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He’s saying, ‘I’m a business guy and I know how to fix it,’ and this is his business.”
The president’s comments came after Cory Booker, the Democratic mayor of Newark, N.J, on Sunday described the Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney’s Bain record as a “distraction from the real issues.”
Booker later said that he was trying to voice his “profound frustration” with negative campaigning but, along with criticisms coming from former Obama car czar Steve Rattner and former Rep. Harold Ford (D-Tenn.), his remarks have been taken as a sign that not all Democrats are satisfied with this Obama campaign tactic.
Obama tried to stress Monday that while there’s nothing wrong with the kind of work Bain Capital does, it’s not necessarily the right background for the president of the United States to have.
“When you’re president — as opposed to the head of a private equity firm — your job is not simply to maximize profits. your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a fair shot,” he said. “If your main argument for how to grow the economy was ‘You knew how to make a lot of money for investors’ then you’re missing what this job is about. That doesn’t mean you weren’t good at private equity. But that’s not what my job is as president.”
Obama wouldn’t directly say whether Romney was responsible for the job losses of the workers featured in the Obama campaign’s video released last week about a steel company that shuttered years after Bain took it over, after Romney had left his job as CEO of the firm.
“Mr. Romney is responsible for the proposals he’s putting forward for how he says he’s going to fix the economy, and if the main basis for him suggesting he can do a better job is his track record as the head of a private equity firm, then both the upsides and the downsides are worth examining,” the president said.
Obama also spoke about the future of American involvement in Afghanistan and other issues discussed with the NATO members in the two-day conference. Monday evening, he heads to deliver a commencement speech at a Joplin, Mo. high school which was ravaged by tornadoes last year.
Sources: CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, Politico, The Blaze
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