By DeWayne Wickham
Is the outsourcing noose tightening around
Mitt Romney’s neck, or is the presumptive Republican
presidential nominee being unfairly accused of having headed a venture capital
company that put profits ahead of preserving American jobs?
The Obama campaign’s charge that Bain Capital, the Boston-based firm Romney founded,
controlled businesses that outsourced thousands of U.S. jobs to Australia, Asia and Europe has hurt the
GOP candidate, according to polls of voters in several battleground
states.
But Romney, who says that as president,
he’ll be the job-creator-in-chief for Americans, claims he left Bain in February
1999 to run the U.S. Olympics Committee, before the outsourcing
began. The Obama campaign has countered with a television ad that says under
Romney’s leadership, Bain actually
pioneered the outsourcing of American jobs. Each campaign has accused the other of
lying.
What’s certain is that an odor of mendacity
pollutes the air of this political season. And, with so much stock being placed
in this ugly war of words, the outcome of the presidential election could turn
on the exposure of the fabulist in this matter.
That might not be easily done. Though
The Boston Globe has uncovered Securities and
Exchange Commission documents that show that Bain said Romney was the company’s
“sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive
officer and president” until 2002, the GOP presidential
candidate says he played no role in the running of the company
after 1999. His denial comes even as the newspaper uncovered a Massachusetts
financial disclosure form in which Romney reported that he earned executive
compensation from the firm in 2001 and 2002.
Seizing on this issue, the Obama campaign
started airing some hard-hitting television ads in
battleground states that appear to have chipped away at
Romney’s support.
Romney’s campaign responded with a TV ad
that calls the president a
liar, a claim supported by The Washington
Post. Its Fact Checker column concluded after examining
the documents the Globe uncovered “that Romney essentially left
Bain in 1999” and played no
part in outsourcing U.S. jobs.
But PolitiFact.com, the Tampa Bay
Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking column, disagreed. The
“exact month that Romney stepped away from Bain makes little difference,” it concluded this
month. The outsourcing decisions that came after he purportedly
left his firm were “the kind of move Romney and Bain expected” when they
invested in companies that sought to increase their profits by moving jobs to
countries with lower labor costs, PolitiFact.com said.
On this issue, Romney should cut and run.
When a company says as unequivocally as Bain did that Romney was its chairman,
CEO and president until 2002, it fails the laugh test for anyone to argue
otherwise.
Maybe he delegated most of his day-to-day
decision-making during the years he was running the U.S. Olympics Committee, but
he was the captain of Bain’s ship, even if he wasn’t on the bridge. And it’s not
as though he was averse to outsourcing, since the contract to produce uniforms
for the 2002 Olympics team was given to a Canadian company while he was away from
Bain running that operation.
When it comes to outsourcing, Romney would
do well to change the subject. The more he tries to answer the Obama campaign’s
attack ads, the more damage he’s going to do to his hopes of ever getting into
the Oval Office without an invitation.
