U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks while standing on top of a table at a campaign event in Golden, Colo., Aug. 2, 2012.
Over the summer, Obama’s team worked hard to define Romney as a rapacious plutocrat, and one of the main weapons it wielded was the record of Bain Capital, the private-equity firm Romney co-founded. Obama’s campaign seized on a Washington Post article, which called Bain a “pioneer” in the practice of investing in companies which shipped jobs overseas. But though he retained an ownership stake in the company during the time Bain was making many of these investments, Romney was not actually managing Bain during this period; he had moved to Salt Lake City to rejuvenate its sputtering Olympic preparations. And while Bain profited from the practice of outsourcing, it was only one of many firms which did so.