Over the past week, a Washington Post story about Mitt Romney and Bain Capital’s role in “outsourcing” and “offshoring” American jobs prompted a flurry of ads and dubious assertions from the Obama campaign along those lines — and now, FactCheck.Org has determined that there is “no evidence to support the claim that Romney — while he was still running Bain Capital — shipped American jobs overseas.” That is, the Obama campaign’s line of attack about our prospective “outsourcer-in-chief” appears to have little basis in fact.
They run down the various allegations and the lacking support for them:
One TV ad, called “Come and Go,” claims that Romney “shipped jobs to China and Mexico.” But two examples cited by the Obama campaign occurred after Romney left Bain. There’s no clear evidence that a third company shipped jobs to China under Romney.
A second ad called “Revealed” mocks Romney’s tough talk about cracking down on China’s trade practices by saying “all he’s ever done is send them our jobs” and citing the Washington Post article. But the newspaper article contained no examples of U.S. jobs being shipped to China while Romney was working at Bain.
The “Come and Go” ad casts Romney as a “corporate raider,” but that term, loaded with negative connotations, is simply inaccurate. Bain didn’t engage in hostile takeovers when Romney was at the helm.
That ad also repeats the claim that as governor of Massachusetts, Romney was “outsourcing state jobs to India.” But it wasn’t the state that outsourced contracts. Rather, Romney vetoed a measure that would have prevented the state from doing business with a state contractor that was locating state customer-service calls in India.
The Romney campaign also released a useful PowerPoint this week explaining what happened with the various companies — most of them added jobs in the U.S. during Romney’s tenure at Bain.