Just in case you needed any further persuasion that Barack Obama’s carping about Mitt Romney’s finances is both stupid and hypocritical, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul noted on Tuesday that Obama himself has accepted six figures’ worth of political donations from executives of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s old investment firm. “President Obama has based his entire reelection campaign on a vicious, dishonest assault on Mitt Romney’s business career. The real question for President Obama is this: if Bain Capital is so bad, why have you taken nearly $120,000 in donations from them? President Obama’s actions are the height of hypocrisy,” Saul declared.
The precise total is $118,121, and Obama has been taking that Bain money ever since he ran for the Senate. Furthermore, as noted by ABC News, “One of Obama’s top campaign financiers – Jonathan Lavine – is also managing director at Bain, bundling between $100,000 and $200,000 in contributions for the 2012 Obama Victory Fund, according to estimates released by the Obama campaign.” Humorously, Lavine is also the executive who is actually responsible for some of the decisions Obama has most stridently hammered Romney for, even though they were decisions made after Romney left the company.
The hypocrisy-soaked response from Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt is hilarious:
“Mitt Romney is the only person campaigning for president who says that during his tenure as a corporate buyout specialist his goal was job creation and that we should evaluate his qualifications for the presidency based on that record,” LaBolt told reporters on a conference call.
“As the president has made clear when he’s discussed this, the job of the President of the United States is to worry about the workers and the livelihoods of middle-class families just as much as it is to worry about profit creation,” he said.
Actually, Mr. LaBolt, the “job of the President of the United States” is neither of those things… and even so, Barack Obama is a hard-core proven failure at both of them. The whole point of the Obama campaign is that the incumbent cannot be “evaluated” based on his “qualifications,” either during his initial run for office, or his re-election campaign. Attempts at such evaluation are generally denounced as racism.
But wait, there’s even more jaw-dropping hypocrisy to document! Obama has also been slamming Romney for “outsourcing,” by which he means not just the active relocation of American jobs to overseas production facilities, but merely investing in foreign companies. As recently as last Saturday, Obama complained to a Virginia audience that Romney “invested in companies that have been called pioneers of outsourcing. I don’t want a pioneer in outsourcing. I want some insourcing.”
But as the Washington Examiner reports, Barack and Michelle Obama have invested between $200,000 and $450,000 in the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, which has huge holdings in Apple, General Electric, and IBM… all of which are very much ‘pioneers in outsourcing.’
Apple moved so many jobs overseas that economist Jared Bernstein cited the company as “an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now.” Who’s Jared Bernstein? Oh, he just used to be one of Obama’s economic advisers, up until last year.
General Electric, headed up by Obama’s good friend Jeffrey Immelt – hand-picked by the President to chair his council of economic advisors – was “the first U.S. company to outsource software work to India,” according to a book written by an Indian “pioneer in oursourcing.” And IBM has moved over 70 percent of its work force overseas!
I assume Ben LaBolt will show the strength of his convictions and immediately resign from the Obama campaign when he learns of these stunning revelations. I wish his successor the best of luck in making sense of the ignorant hypocrisy billowing from his candidate, as he continues his efforts to frighten Americans into voting for four more years of economic collapse and double-digit unemployment.
