Barack Obama, Bain Capital | featured news

Actually, it’s not the economy. At least not this week. A presidential campaign that Republicans wanted to be focused relentlessly on President Obama’s job-creation record seems to be about almost everything else at the moment. In part that’s the result of a monthslong effort by the Obama campaign to shift attention to Mitt Romney’s wealth and business record.

The main super PAC helping President Obama is out with an emotional ad today slamming Mitt Romney's business record, featuring an ex-steelworker talking about his wife's death after the couple lost their health insurance.

Restore Our Future, the super PAC backing Mitt Romney, released a new radio ad Friday knocking President Barack Obama for his handling of the economy and calling into question the Obama campaign's repeated attacks on Romney and Bain Capital. The new spot, titled "Imagine," is part of a $1 million radio ad campaign and will air from July 27 to Aug. 2 across swing states Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Trying to shift the presidential campaign narrative away from his personal finances and tenure at Bain Capital, Republican Mitt Romney will launch a fresh assault this week accusing President Obama of political cronyism at the expense of middle-class workers... Obama campaign officials see this as a weak line of attack, in part because, they said, Romney played favorites by steering tax breaks to some companies over others as governor of Massachusetts.

Citing a poll conducted by Global Strategy Group and Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group in the battleground states of Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida, Priorities USA claimed that more voters say Romney’s experience at Bain makes them less likely to vote for him, 37% to 27%. Claiming that its own anti-Bain ads are working, Priorities USA pointed out that in the 11 markets they’ve advertised in within those five states, Obama leads Romney by eight points (49% to 41%) compared with a three-point lead in those without the ads (46% to 43%).

President Obama says Mitt Romney's business experience doesn't qualify him for the presidency because it was about making money, not creating jobs. "If you're a head of a large private equity firm or hedge fund, your job is to make money," Obama told CBS News. "It's not to create jobs. It's not even to create a successful business -- it's to make sure that you're maximizing returns for your investor."

Mitt Romney's new TV ad says President Obama's attacks on his jobs record have been "misleading, unfair and untrue." The new ad once again uses Hillary Rodham Clinton to make the Romney campaign's point about Obama, showing an image of her from the 2008 Democratic primary saying "shame on you" to her then-rival for distorting her record.

A super PAC backing President Obama is out with a new TV ad today criticizing Mitt Romney for making money on business deals in which companies went bankrupt... "For every company he drove into the ground, Romney averaged a $92 million dollar profit," the narrator says. "Now he says his business experience would make him a good president? If Romney wins, the middle class loses."

The attack is the latest iteration of President Obama’s attempts to demonize Mitt Romney over his tenure at Bain Capital.