Obama campaign piles on with criticism of Romney, Bain Capital

The Obama campaign is joining Mitt Romney’s GOP presidential rivals in hammering the former Massachusetts governor for his time as an executive at Bain Capital.

In an open letter titled “Free Enterprise,” Obama campaign adviser Stephanie Cutter ripped Romney for touting his record as a job creator when, according to her, Romney’s primary goal was the creation of wealth for his investment firm — even if that meant destroying jobs.

“To achieve that end, Romney closed over a thousand plants, stores and offices, and cut employee wages, benefits and pensions,” Cutter said in the letter. “He laid off American workers and outsourced their jobs to other countries. And he and his partners made hundreds of millions of dollars while taking companies to bankruptcy.”

{mosads}The attack is a direct take on a line adopted by Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry in the days leading up to the New Hampshire primary, in which they called Romney a “vulture capitalist” and framed his firm as an unethical institution that “undermined capitalism.”

Cutter cited a factory in South Carolina, where the GOP candidates are currently campaigning, that closed down after Bain took over. Perry has cited the same factory in his attacks.

“That is Romney’s record. His overwrought response to questions about it has been to insist that any criticism of his business record is an assault on “free enterprise” itself,” Cutter’s memo read. “But this is just an attempt to evade legitimate scrutiny of the record on which he says he’s running. “Free enterprise” isn’t running for President, Mitt Romney is. And voters deserve straight answers about his record, so they can know how his perspective would influence his decisions and actions if he were President of the United States.”

Gingrich and Perry have been criticized by the right, most prominently by influential conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, for waging attacks on Romney that they say are liberal, anti-capitalist arguments that will be adopted by the Obama campaign in the general election.

While both have scaled back the attacks in recent days, they have argued that it’s a proper line of vetting and good preparation for Romney, should he be the Republican nominee in the general election.