US News

New anti-Mitt ad backfires

WASHINGTON — President Obama yesterday debuted a campaign ad that called Mitt Romney a “vampire” for allegedly savaging companies with his private-equity firm Bain Capital — but it quickly came back to bite him.

The two-minute ad says Romney’s firm took over GST Steel in Kansas City, pocketed profits, ran up debt, declared bankruptcy and fired all 750 workers.

“It was like a vampire,” former steelworker Jack Cobb says in the ad. “They came in and sucked the life out of us.”

But the attack even got bad reviews from Obama’s car czar, Steve Rattner, who ordered widespread dealership closures for Obama’s auto bailouts.

“The ad is unfair,” he said on MSNBC, adding that the campaign shouldn’t politicize those types of job losses.

“Unfortunately, this is part of capitalism. This is part of life,” he said. “And I don’t think there is anything Bain Capital did that they need to be embarrassed about.”

The spot ignores that Romney stopped running Bain in 1999 to go save the Salt Lake City Olympics, two years before the 2001 bankruptcy.

The GST mill also went under as the entire US steel industry drowned in a flood of cheap imports.

The “vampire” attack struck at the heart of Romney’s campaign, in which he touts his huge success in business as his chief qualification for being able to turn around the struggling US economy.

The Obama campaign said it will continue to hit Romney’s business record and undermine his claim to being a “job creator.”