Mike Huckabee

The Romney campaign has released a new ad in response to the Obama ad, claiming Romney outsourced jobs to foreign nations as head of Bain Capital. The ad points out that both the Washington Post and Factcheck.org debunked the claim, but that Obama’s campaign continues to run it anyway. And the ad uses unusually blunt language. It says that Obama lied about Hillary Clinton’s record in 2008, he’s running a dishonest campaign now, and if he can’t be trusted to tell the truth, how can he be trusted to lead? The ad raised eyebrows among the pundits. They say it’s “risky” to make such blunt negative statements about the President. Then again, the President continues making blunt negative statements about Romney, even when they’ve been objectively disproven. And now, everyone’s talking about this ad all over the media…and Romney didn’t even have to pay them to run it. Maybe that’s what he means when he claims to have good business sense.

By the way, the outsourcing horse seems to be collapsing, so the Obama campaign has found a new one to ride: that Romney is responsible for outsourcing done after he stepped down as the head of Bain Capital because SEC papers suggest that he kept running it for up to three years after he claimed to have left. It’s actually not a new story. The Washington Post factchecker and FactCheck.org have looked into it before and found not much to it. Fortune magazine has now read the alleged incriminating documents. They say the papers list Romney as a “key investment professional” on a couple of later Bain deals, but that doesn’t mean he had any operational role. Like the misunderstanding over what “outsourcing” means, the people touting it as a scandal apparently didn’t understand the terms used in business documents. But then, who expects anyone in Washington these days to understand the language of business?