'Mitt Romney is Bain Capital,' Workers’ Voice commercials say. The return of Bain

For the final days of the 2012 campaign, the Democratic groups pummeling Mitt Romney on television have returned to the weapon they started with last spring: Bain Capital.

The Obama campaign and its super PAC allies have spent months trashing Romney’s policies and personal values across the airwaves, branding him as a job-killing, abortion rights-opposing, Medicare-privatizing tycoon who disdains working-class and poor Americans.


But with a little over a week left in the race, several of the Democrats’ top independent spenders are leaning hard into the Bain message, eschewing a pure policy message for a gut-punch reminder that the former Massachusetts governor made his fortune through controversial deals in the private-equity industry.

The late emphasis on Bain, Democratic strategists say, reflects both the potency of Bain as an attack against Romney in general, and the pivotal significance of Midwestern states such as Ohio where the Bain message is especially resonant. Though Romney remains no better than tied with Obama in most national and swing-state polls, he has gained enough ground since the first debate on Oct. 3 that reinforcing Obama’s standing in states such as Ohio and Wisconsin is of paramount importance.

The pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action is re-airing one of its most powerful Bain-bashing ads: The spot, titled “Stage,” features an employee laid off by Bain describing how workers at his company were asked to build a stage from which executives announced their plant was closing.

Workers’ Voice, a super PAC backed by the AFL-CIO, rolled out new TV ads in select battleground markets — in Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa — attacking Romney for Bain’s current decision to outsource jobs from Illinois to China.

“Mitt Romney is Bain Capital,” the Workers’ Voice commercials say. “And right now, Bain is shipping jobs to China and forcing workers to train their Chinese replacements.”

In addition, the super PAC American Bridge announced Monday that it will air $161,000 in TV and online ads in Ohio targeting Romney’s economic views, including his years at Bain.

Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who advises Priorities USA, said Bain ads have the potential to cut through the fog of commercials from both sides that’s currently cluttering the airwaves with statistics about taxes, job creation, health care and more.

“The Obama campaign, I think, is pushing back very effectively against [Romney’s] efforts to make himself a little less scary on his ideological agenda. We’re playing our part by reminding voters what his values were in business and what they are likely to be as president,” Garin said. “If we were running policy advertising, our ability to add or subtract from all the other gross rating points that people are being exposed to would be on the margins at best.”

Garin came out of the field over the weekend with a new Virginia poll, showing Obama up 3 points against Romney, and said “we’re already seeing it tick back up, the percentage of voters who say that as a businessman, Romney was just looking out for himself and his investors, even at the expense of workers.”

Romney has contested that charge during his presidential bid and has argued that he severed ties with Bain before many of the layoffs and factory closings for which Democrats attacked him occurred. Romney says he departed Bain in 1999 when he left to head the Salt Lake City Olympics, though some company documents continued to identify him as a top executive after that point.

But Romney has also made his biography as a businessman, largely as founder and CEO of Bain, a central argument for why he would be a superior steward of the economy.

Romney’s time at Bain has been equally central to the messaging of both Priorities USA and Workers’ Voice — even more so than for the Obama campaign. Priorities kicked off the first flurry of anti-Bain ads last spring, while Workers’ Voice has included information about Romney’s Bain record in all of its mailings, phone calls and other voter contacts.

AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer said Romney’s Bain record remains the most powerful tool Democrats have to frame the 2012 economic debate.

“The Bain experience really gives voters a chance to vote on the policies of the last 30 years, that have given so much preference to capital, to financial manipulation, rather than to hard work,” Podhorzer said. “That’s how we want to end the campaign, with people thinking about the people in the ads who were forced to train their replacements as their jobs were sent overseas.”

Even this week, as Romney remains highly competitive in the polls, there are signs of lasting damage to his personal image. A Pew survey published Monday, which found the presidential race tied among likely voters, found that Obama leads Romney by 28 points on the question of “who connects well with ordinary Americans.” Romney led Obama by 8 points as the candidate “better able to improve the job situation.”

Romney’s campaign has pushed back on the Bain attacks with surprising reticence throughout the 2012 race; though Romney frequently describes himself as a businessman-politician with a deep understanding of the economy, he rarely delves into the details of his background in the financial services industry.

Romney’s campaign has taken steps to bolster his personal favorability ratings, which have improved since his strong performance at the first presidential debate in Denver. The pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future is running commercials featuring testimonials from a family whose terminally ill son Romney helped. But neither Romney nor his outside-group allies have put real money into defending his private equity record on TV and radio.

A Romney adviser dismissed the Democrats’ renewed messaging push on Bain as a desperation play — an attempt to re-disqualify Romney after he jolted his campaign to new life in the debate.

“If the Democrats could finish on a positive message, they would,” Romney adviser Matt McDonald said. “But the president has no positive message, no agenda for a second term and nothing left to offer voters. They’ve thrown everything including the kitchen sink and it hasn’t worked, so now their only choice is to throw the same kitchen sink again. It’s the campaign equivalent of the president’s policies: keep doing the same thing over again and hope for a different outcome.”

Responding to the renewed barrage from Democrats against Romney’s Bain background, the Romney campaign has offered little more than a predictable set of quotes criticizing Obama’s economic record. On Friday, Romney’s campaign sent out four Web videos — not TV ads – defending his “record of building, fixing and growing businesses.”

“We’ve got to champion small business. The president’s policies are crushing small business,” Romney says in one of the videos, which features supportive comments from business leaders he worked with at Bain.

Few if any undecided voters will see that footage before Election Day, even as the Priorities USA and Workers’ Voice ads run at significant strength in key swing states, unless they actively seek out Romney’s videos online.

To Romney advisers, the fact that the presidential race remains so close is proof that the Bain issue is not a deal-breaker with voters, especially now that the preponderance of public polling now shows Romney faring better against Obama on questions related to job creation. Romney campaign data shows that his business experience remains a net positive, according to Republicans close to the campaign, and there’s skepticism on the GOP side about whether a fresh round of Bain attacks can do new damage.

“It’s just wallpaper at this point, if you don’t have something new to say,” said Republican strategist Alex Castellanos. “In my experience, the only thing that cuts through this late in the campaign, that’s been so negative, is something a little hopeful — a little inspiring.”

Reintroducing Bain, argued former Michele Bachmann campaign adviser David Polyansky, looks more like “trying to fire up [the Democratic] base and get them out rather than win voters who may be on the fence.”

Yet it only takes a glance over the electoral map to see where Romney’s corporate background is still problematic. Democratic and Republican strategists in the Midwest — and in the key state of Ohio in particular — agree that the accumulated attacks on Romney as a cold-hearted rich guy have made a difference in the battlegrounds that could swing the election. (The ads may or may not pack a punch this week in battlegrounds like Virginia, which are most affected by Hurricane Sandy.)

One Republican strategist channeled a widely held sentiment in the GOP, fretting that Romney had failed to tell a positive story about his business experience before Democrats swooped in to define him in negative terms.

“They should have done more on Bain earlier,” the strategist said of Romney’s campaign.

Priorities USA strategists said it was a recent focus group in Ohio that convinced them to put “Stage” back on the air — after voters there indicated the 60-second commercial was one of the most memorable spots of the cycle.

“I had actually thought for a while that because it’s a 60-second ad, we couldn’t afford to put it on again,” said Garin, referring to the higher expense of running the ad. “After listening to voters in Ohio, clearly we couldn’t afford not to put it on again, especially at a point in the campaign when Romney’s side still feels a need to humanize him.”

Another Priorities strategist underscored the character-based nature of the Bain message: “One important goal of Bain is keeping and expanding that gap on the question of who you can trust, when voters are hearing an incomprehensible amount of policy facts that seem contradictory in the last days.”

Workers’ Voice communications director Eddie Vale emphasized that while the labor group was sharpening its attacks on Romney’s private equity background, it never eased up on Bain in the first place.

“It’s always been Bain for us,” Vale said. “With our members, this is just such a core issue and it’s something that we have credibility with our members on. If you know something’s working, why change it?”

The electoral map, Vale said, tells you almost all you need to know: “We know that Bain and the auto bailout are the two best things [for Obama] in Ohio.”