President Obama and his campaign are being "dishonest" when they attack his record as a business executive, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said this morning on Fox & Friends as a new week on the presidential campaign trail began where the last one left off.
We're basically where we were on Friday, when Romney said he "had no role whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999" and the Obama camp was arguing that public records indicate he did.
For his part, the president says there's no reason for him to say he's sorry about ads that are blasting Romney over the Bain connection. "No, we will not apologize," he told Virginia's WAVY-TV.
As FactCheck.org says, whether Romney was or wasn't still involved in the running of Bain from 1999 into 2002 "has become a key point of contention, because Obama TV ads accuse Romney of shipping U.S. jobs overseas."
That nonpartisan fact checking group has also reported that "none of the SEC filings [cited by the Obama campaign as proof of Romney's post-1999 involvement in Bain's operations] show that Romney was anything but a passive, absentee owner during that time, as both Romney and Bain have long said. It should not surprise anyone that Romney retained certain titles while he was working out the final disposition of his ownership, for example."
Another nonpartisan watchdog, PolitiFact.com, has written that:
"Romney and his campaign have noted repeatedly that Romney left management of the company in 1999. That may be, but Romney was the company's founder, providing vision and direction for Bain. It's not as if his influence ended the moment he left to run the Olympics."
Still, says PolitiFact, "calling the companies 'pioneers in outsourcing' overstates the case. They did promote outsourcing, but they were part of a trend already decades in the making."
On Morning Edition today, NPR's David Folkenflik broke down the brouhaha, the fact-checking and how the Romney campaign has handled the story.
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