Obama tries to undermine Romney's record on jobs

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama tried Monday to tarnish Mitt Romney as a corporate titan who got rich by cutting rather than creating jobs, opening a new effort to undercut the likely Republican nominee's claims that his business background is just what America needs in a time of deep economic uncertainty.

At the center of the Obama campaign effort are a new website, TV ad and online video including interviews with onetime workers at a Kansas City, Missouri, steel mill that Romney's former private equity firm, Bain Capital, failed to successfully restructure. Workers lost jobs and health care benefits. Pensions were reduced.

"It was like a vampire. They came in and sucked the life out of us," says steelworker Jack Cobb. Add John Wiseman: "Bain Capital walked away with a lot of money that they made off this plant. We view Mitt Romney as a job destroyer."

Countering the criticism, Romney's campaign said the former Massachusetts governor welcomes an election-season conversation with Obama about jobs. "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," Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in a statement.

Romney's campaign has pointed to a net job loss during Obama's presidency, most of which occurred during the first few months of his administration. Obama has touted the creation of 4.2 million new jobs over the last 26 months as his policies took hold.

Both candidates are seeking to pivot to voters' No. 1 issue, the economy, and away from the social issues that dominated after the president announced his support for gay marriage last week.

But Obama also used a visit to New York on Monday to rally support among women, young people and gay voters who made up crucial voting blocs for him in the 2008 election.

He defended his view that gay couples should have the right to marry at a fundraiser hosted by singer Ricky Martin and the LGBT Leadership Council, saying that the U.S. has never gone wrong when it "expanded rights and responsibilities to everybody."

"That doesn't weaken families. That strengthens families," he said. "It's the right thing to do."

Romney told an audience on Saturday at a commencement ceremony at the evangelical Liberty University in Virginia that marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman.

On Monday, Obama also gave a commencement address to Barnard College, a women's college, and taped an interview to be aired Tuesday on "The View," a popular day-time TV talk show aimed at women.

The president's choice of Barnard as his first commencement address of the spring underscored the intense focus both candidates have placed on women. An Associated Press-GfK poll conducted earlier this month showed Obama with a sizable advantage over Romney with women voters, 54 percent to 39 percent.

Obama urged the graduates to fight for their place at "the head of the table" and help lead a country still battered by economic woes toward brighter days. "I believe that the women of this generation will help lead the way," he said.

In the course of a week of global economic and military diplomacy — the G8 and NATO summits — Obama also is holding campaign events in Florida, Missouri, Iowa, Nevada and North Carolina, where he will focus on Romney's role at Bain, a company he co-founded.

Vice President Joe Biden was holding two days of events in Ohio, where he was expected to discuss Romney's role as a corporate buyout specialist.

Romney, meanwhile, prepared to deliver a speech Tuesday in Iowa on reducing the huge federal debt.

Monday's dreary global financial backdrop set the stage for a sharp debate in the coming weeks between the candidates over their competing economic philosophies, and it highlighted the public's unhappiness with big business and government institutions alike.

JPMorgan Chase's disclosure that it lost more than $2 billion on bad trading bets renewed calls for tighter oversight of the nation's biggest financial institutions, a position that Obama has supported and Romney has opposed. And world markets were tenuous as Greece weighed whether to renege on the terms of its painful austerity program and leave the Euro currency bloc. That could hurt Obama's attempts to accelerate the limping U.S. recovery.

Obama said in an interview with ABC's TV talk show "The View" that JPMorgan Chase's loss underscored the need for Wall Street rules passed by Congress two years ago, many of which have not yet gone into effect.

Romney and Obama alike contend that in a nation where unemployment is hovering around 8 percent, voters will choose a president based on economic arguments. Obama is trying to persuade voters to stick with him as he heralds an economic rebound, as sluggish as it is. Romney counters that only he — with his deep background in business — knows how to jumpstart the nation's job market.

The two men have little in common in their views of how to get the country moving.

Obama has pumped money into the economy to stimulate growth and has cut some taxes though he also advocates raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. Romney argues that lower taxes across the board and fewer government restrictions are the answer. Both are trying to win over an electorate that is furious with Wall Street and distrustful of corporations, and Obama's new campaign effort was squarely aimed at working-class voters, a group that has been reluctant to support the president in the past.

Obama's TV ad was scheduled to run in five battleground states — Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado — and was part of a larger $25 million, month-long campaign. But it was limited in scope.

Republican officials tracking the ad buy said the Obama team was airing the 2-minute spot only on Wednesday in the five states.

Romney's campaign, meanwhile, aggressively worked behind the scenes to counter the Obama campaign's Bain message.

It released a Web video about a successful steel company that Bain invested in called Steel Dynamics. The video shows steelworkers describing the company as the embodiment of the American dream, noting that the company grew from a workforce of 1,400 to more than 6,000.

The campaign planned to frame the attacks on Romney's record at Bain as an "attack on free enterprise," and to cast the auto bailout supported by Obama as an example of private equity at work.

Romney advisers predicted the attacks on the presumptive Republican nominee's record at Bain would backfire because most voters understand that some business ventures succeed while others fail.

"This is someone who understand how the economy works, and I think most Americans also understand that there's never guaranteed success," said Ed Gillespie, a senior Romney campaign strategist.

Romney, a multimillionaire, left Bain in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympic Games but has maintained a financial interest in the company since departing. He has said that his firm had a strong overall track record, creating jobs in prominent companies like Staples and Sports Authority, while acknowledging that some companies Bain invested in were unsuccessful.

The Obama ad, which reprises criticism leveled at Romney during the Republican primaries, focuses on one of those unsuccessful companies, GST Steel.

Bain was the majority shareholder in GST beginning in 1993. The company eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2001, a period in which the U.S. steel industry was roiled by a flood of cheap steel imports. About 750 workers lost their jobs, and were left without health benefits and with reduced pensions. The federal government was forced to put $44 million into the company's underfunded pension plan.

Criticism of Romney's time at Bain first emerged during his unsuccessful 1994 Senate race against Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in Massachusetts. In this year's primary battle, Republican Newt Gingrich called Romney's role in the private equity firm "exploitive" and "not defensible."

Democrats view the current period as an important time to define Romney's economic record for general election voters. The president's defenders say he can ill afford to allow Romney to present himself as a can-do Mr. Fix-It on the economy during the summer and into the fall.