The Obama re-election campaign's initial attack on Romney's time at Bain was vulnerable to scrutiny. But a recent Washington Post story has drawn a direct line from Romney to outsourcing jobs while he was at Bain, giving the campaign something to run on from now until November.
Finding avenues of attack that cannot be undermined should be a top priority for any political campaign. The Post story makes it clear that Bain invested in companies that specialized in job outsourcing services while Romney was with the company. This in of itself is enough material for an attack. But the Republican candidate has chosen to use anti-outsourcing rhetoric as part of his stump speech, creating a political gimme for the Obama campaign.
The initial Bain critique focused on specific companies that were shuttered as part of the private equity business. While generally effective, voices on the other side tried to point to successful companies like Staples where Bain financing and management played a positive role. We also heard from Romney surrogates the dubious claim that 80% of Bain's investments under their control "grew revenues." These responses are not necessarily valid but they do damage the initial attack by creating the perception that there are two sides to the story.
It will be much harder for Romney and his surrogates to create that "he said, she said" dynamic in their response to the Post's outsourcing/offshoring article and the Obama campaign's use of that article in their ads. What can they say in response? Probably something like: Governor Romney believes President Obama's jobs-killing agenda has killed job creators who aren't creating jobs. They cannot claim that Bain's connections to offshoring firms was an overall plus for the economy because then they would be ceding the basic point. They can't say: Mitt Romney is proud of his record at Bain Capital. This would be tantamount to blessing the offshoring process.