Republicans gleefully quoted Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) on Tuesday, saying in press releases that he had joined Democrats like Cory Booker and Harold Ford in defending Bain Capital from campaign attacks.
But the “remarks” in question were just one sentence in a forceful defense of Obama by Warner that echoed a speech the president himself made Monday.
In an MSNBC appearance Tuesday, Warner said that while he thought Bain Capital had done well for its investors, running the firm might not be the best preparation for a potential president.
“Bain Capital was a very successful business,” Warner said. “I think they got a good return for their investors. That is what they were supposed to do. I think when you’re in public life, though, what you’ve got is a different time horizon. The notion that everything in government is exactly the same way that it is in business, they’re different time horizons when you’ve got to invest for the long haul, when you actually do the kind of early stage investing, whether in preschool, whether it’s in K-12, whether infrastructure, that doesn’t pay back quarter to quarter.”
His response was similar to Obama’s on Monday, when the president defended his use of the Bain issue.
“If your main argument for how to grow in the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors’, then you are missing what this job is about,” Obama said. Like Warner, he stressed the importance of providing a safety net for workers and government investments in long-term growth.
But the RNC quickly seized on what it said was evidence of Warner “criticizing Obama’s attacks on private equity.” They extracted one nugget: “Bain Capital was a very successful business. They got a good return for their investors” and circulated it to reporters. Mitt Romney’s campaign whittled it down to a single sentence in a press release, insisting Warner “defend[ed]” Bain Capital: “I think Bain Capital was a very successful business.”
“It clearly is not an accurate characterization of the interview,” a spokesman for Warner, Kevin Hall, told TPM. Hall said that “there is not” any daylight between Obama and Warner when it comes to Bain.
During the primary, the Romney camp drew the ire of various newspapers for editing their endorsements to remove any negative portions. They’re hardly the only ones who have been caught whittling things down, however: This week an Obama spokesman tweeted a 30-second clip of a four-minute video by Cory Booker that showed him criticizing Romney but left out an opening in which he condemned negative campaigning in general.
