Democrats Unveil Anti-Romney 'Economics' Ad Campaign [VIDEO]

Supporters of President rolled out a new television ad which highlights business strategies at former company that closed companies and put Americans out of work.

The advertising campaign, entitled Romney Economics, purports to show the economic distress some manufacturing workers faced after dealing with takeover bids by , a company run by Romney.

A two minute preview presented to the press at the on May 15, showed what happened to workers at GST Steel, a 100-plus-year-old company in Missouri that was taken over by Bain and saddled with large amounts of corporate debt. The company later shipped jobs overseas and filed for bankruptcy.

, the chairman of the , and , a former state Senator, took turns focusing on some of the points of the advertising.

“Mitt Romney’s business record isn’t one of growing companies and creating jobs,” said Buckley. “It’s one of broken promises and shattered dreams, for thousands of hard-working Americans.”

Burling said Bain often focused on leveraging companies with debt and then collecting fees from the transactions, putting money in the executive’s pockets. The companies were put in more difficult financial conditions that would then require Bain to layoff employees, cut pay, or eliminate pensions and benefits to pay off the debts.

Buckley said that most Americans have a problem with this kind of business activity but Romney didn’t, “as long as he got his paycheck, he didn’t seem to have a problem” with workers losing their paychecks.

Buckley noted that what Bain did was perfectly legal and they weren’t challenging whether Romney or the company could do what they did. He said the ad was also not about challenging the private equity industry, or the free market or capitalist system. What they were challenging, Buckley said, was “whether those values are what we want in a president … especially the same kind of single-minded focus of putting profits before people that caused the crisis that we are still recovering from.” Instead, Buckley called for the creation of an economy that "will last" and that included "building up the middle-class."

Along with GST Steel, Burling pointed to another company, Holson Burnes Group, which made photo albums and picture frames and had factories in Claremont and South Carolina. Bain dismantled the company, stripped it of its wealth, and shipped jobs overseas, costing the city 150 jobs, he said. 

“His vision of the gold-plated sharks get it all is not something this state or this nation need, at this time,” Burling said.

Keeping Romney economics “out of the White House” was a major focus of the press conference, with both representatives alluding to the point, in one form or another, four or five times. However, when it was pointed out to them that Vice President , who is already in the White House, voted for most if not all the legislation that Bain utilized to send jobs overseas, raid pensions, and destroy companies, neither wanted to be critical of their own party’s voting records.

“We’re contrasting actions with political verbiage,” Burling said. “Mitt Romney’s actions tell us what he really believes and how he really acts. It’s absolutely clear that Democrats have an entirely different view of economic power and how we used power to enhance jobs [to] get more economic activity going on.”

Burling said Democrats supported hiring more teachers, providing health care, and making necessary infrastructure investments that rebuild the middle class, something Republicans would not support.

Buckley said they weren’t suggesting the Romney did anything illegal. The question was whether he should be president. Biden, he said, “never bought up a company, pillaged it, and took people’s pensions and economic security and made a profit off it.” Buckley placed blame for the economic crisis on both of the Bush administrations, adding that business people and those people in government at the time, created the crisis.