YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – President Obama’s surrogates at the national, state and local levels laid the groundwork for Vice President Joe Biden’s visit today in two separate events Tuesday.
The Democrats’ strategy was made apparent at the noontime news conference staged outside City Hall featuring local leaders and the conference call an hour later featuring an Obama campaign national co-chairman and the Ohio party’s leader.
During both events, Democrats portrayed presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney's perceived strength as an astute, highly successful businessman as a liability.
At noon Tuesday, 24 hours before today’s event at M7 Technologies where Biden is scheduled to speak, Mahoning County Commissioner Carol Rimedio-Righetti, city Clerk of Courts Sarah Brown Clark and Fourth Ward Councilman Mike Ray joined Dave Green, president of United Auto Workers Local 1714, to advance the vice president’s campaign agenda.
Green spoke of the administration’s investments in the auto industry, which he said polls, pundits and Republicans, including Romney, advised against. “It was the president who ignored politics and made the right decision to step in and allow the companies to restructure,” he remarked. In Ohio, he said, one in eight jobs is connected to the auto industry and one in six cars assembled in America are made in Ohio.
“And yet Mitt Romney has made the ludicrous claim that he can take credit for this,” he said. “Romney suggested that car companies use private financing to restructure. That suggestion has no basis in reality. … The markets were frozen solid. Without public financing General Motors Corp. and Chrysler would have been forced into Chapter 7 liquidation.”
While Romney puts forth his record as a businessman running the venture capital firm Bain Capital, his record “isn’t one of growing companies and creating jobs,” Brown-Clark argued. “It’s one of broken promises and shattered dreams for thousands of hardworking Americans. In deal after deal Romney and his partners tried above all else to make millions of dollars for themselves and they didn’t care that it came at the cost of crippling companies by loading them up with debt," Green said.
While no one challenges Romney’s right to run his business as he saw fit or capitalism as a whole, “It’s legitimate to question the values Romney lived by in business” as he runs for president based on his business record, Green continued.
Ray looked back to Romney’s record as Massachusetts governor, when he said Massachusetts was ranked 47th out of 50 states in terms of job creation and manufacturing jobs declined by half the national average. The kind of “predatory capitalism” that was Romney’s stock-in-trade at Bain was also the driving philosophy that led to the decline of Youngstown Sheet and Tube, he argued.
Many of the same talking points were voiced an hour later – some practically verbatim -- during a conference call featuring former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, one of the Obama reelection campaign’s national cochairmen, and Chris Redfern, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party.
During Biden’s visit, Strickland, who will accompany him at M7 today, said the vice president would highlight the administration’s efforts on behalf of manufacturing, the auto industry and the middle class, and “draw a contrast” to Romney, who has cited his experience at Bain Capital as perhaps his “chief qualification” to be president.
The Republican has said he would use his experience to boost the economy, create jobs and reduce the deficit, but Romney’s business record is “not one of growing companies and creating jobs. It’s of broken promises and shattered dreams for thousands of hardworking Americans,” Strickland echoed. He similarly restated talking points made earlier regarding how Romney and his partners made money.
“We’re not questioning or challenging Romney’s right to run his business as he saw fit, and let me make it clear, no one is questioning the private equity industry,” he reemphasized. “This is about whether those are the values we want in our president, especially when this kind of single-minded focus on making profits ahead of people is exactly what caused the crisis that we’re still recovering from even today.”
Both Strickland and Redfern offered examples of Romney’s approach. Strickland pointed to GST Steel, a 105-year-old steel bar mill Bain took control of in 1993 that went out of business a decade later after being saddled with more than $500 million in debt. At the same time, Romney’s firm walked away with $12 million, a 150% return on its initial investment.
Redfern cited the case of Stage Stores, a company Romney and his partners built from hundreds of small clothing stores they purchased in the late 1980s, which Bain quickly took on an “expensive and expansive growth binge,” the Democratic chairman said, growing from 257 stores in 13 states to more than 600 stores in 24 states including 26 in Ohio.
Bain funded the original purchase using “high-risk junk bonds” from the now-defunct firm Drexel Burnham Lambert and “loaded Stage up with debt,” Redfern said. In 1997 Bain sold its shares “for an enormous profit” but its stock fell more than 58% the following year and it was forced to declare bankruptcy a few years later.
“That’s what happened when Romney applied his economics,” Redfern remarked. “It’s the last thing we need in Ohio.”
During the question-and-answer session that followed, Strickland commented on an ad being run locally by a super PAC that compares Obama unfavorably to other Democratic presidents. In the 2008 primary, Obama lost to Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, remains popular in the Mahoning Valley.
Strickland, who represented part of the Mahoning Valley in Congress, said Valley voters understand the importance of the auto industry and that Romney’s position on the auto industry rescue is “tragic.”
Obama’s opponents “can try to do what they want in terms of local advertising. The president has walked the walk. He has produced. The Mahoning Valley will richly reward him in November as a result of what he has done,” Strickland said.
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.