President Obama's campaign is out with a two-minute TV ad and a six-minute Web video blasting Mitt Romney's career at Bain Capital.

The broadside will air in five key swing states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Iowa and Colorado.

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The ad tells the Obama campaign's version of events at GST Steel, a shuttered Kansas City plant that Bain Capital took over before it went into bankruptcy. The closing cost hundreds their jobs and jeopardized their pensions, according to Obama for America.

The Romney campaign responded quickly, noting that Romney had left day-to-day management of the company to its executive committee in 1999 when he was named to head the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. The GST shutdown happened in 2001.

"We welcome the Obama campaign's attempt to pivot back to jobs and a discussion of their failed record," said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul. "Mitt Romney helped create more jobs in his private sector experience and more jobs as governor of Massachusetts than President Obama has for the entire nation."

Former Obama economic adviser Steve Rattner has also come to Romney's defense, calling the ad "unfair."

"Mitt Romney made a mistake ever talking about the fact that he created 100,000 jobs," Rattner said on MSNBC's Morning Joe. "Bain Capital's responsibility was never to create 100,000 jobs, or some other number, it was to make profits for its investors."

The story, Obama's campaign says, exemplifies Romney's business philosophy "and what it would mean for the American economy." Viewers who want to know more can go to RomneyEconomics.com, a new Obama campaign website that examines other Bain case studies.

"In a career of buying and selling companies, Romney's pattern was to reap quick profits for himself and his investors at the expense of workers and communities," the campaign says in a news release this morning. "Sometimes it meant sending American jobs overseas. Other times, it meant cutting wages and benefits.

"In Romney's economic philosophy, CEOs and wealthy investors prosper by any means necessary, even when it meant companies failed and workers were left behind. Romney believes in two sets of rules -- one for people like him, another for everyone else."

Romney has cited his vast business experience as a plus, arguing he understands the private sector and can make it work for Americans seeking to climb out of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

But even his Republican primary opponents weren't shy about citing some of the more cutthroat aspects of the private equity business and Romney's part in it. Rivals Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, in particular, questioned what they called Romney's "vulture capitalism."