After Friday’s Washington Post article detailing Bain Capital’s work with outsourcing during the time Mitt Romney was at the helm of the firm, the Obama campaign seems to think its point about Romney has been made.
“People really have a fundamental choice in this election,” Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod said on a conference call with reporters Friday. “The question is, do they want an outsourcer-in-chief in the Oval Office or do they want a president who’s going to fight for American jobs and American manufacturing and the American middle class.”
Romney, of course, is the “outsourcer-in-chief” in that sentence. Despite Romney campaign protestations that the Post article doesn’t make the distinction between “off-shoring,” in which American firms are replaced by workers in foreign locations, and “outsourcing,” which can often include moving jobs from one domestic firm to another to save costs, the Obama campaign says the story shows a presumptive Republican nominee who made his money helping companies pay American workers less and less.
“For those of us who looked at that story today, there’s a bright line between offshoring American jobs, that’s moving them ouside of this country, and outsourcing them,” Obama surrogate Leo Hindery, partner at a media industry private equity fund, told reporters on the call. “Bain was a company that preponderantly off-shored jobs. And even in those where it outsourced domestically, it did so into lower-cost settings at the expense of workers and their union organizers. “
