Romney capitalizes on Booker's bipartisan disdain for negative campaigning:
Undeterred, Obama is doubling down on the Bain attack. Mark Memmott tries to follow the melodrama:
[A]n opening is an opening. So team Romney and his supporters focus on the "stop attacking private equity" part of Booker's comments and start firing back at the Obama campaign. Which prompts Booker to put out a video of his own, to say he thinks "President Barack Obama has done such a strong job as a leader of our nation that he more than deserves re-election." … That doesn't stop the Romney campaign from putting out a new video of its own, though. Called Big Bain Backfire, it uses Booker as one example of an Obama supporter who has "had enough" of the Obama campaigns tactics. And that brings us back to the Obama campaign, which as the Los Angeles Times says is doubling down on its Bain Capital-related story line with another, nearly six-minute long, video. Will the cycle ever stop? Probably only when one side decides it's time to focus on a new issue.
Here's the Obama campaign's latest:
Maggie Haberman has more on the Ampad case:
The story of the workers laid off by Ampad — who had to reapply for their jobs with smaller wages and benefits, only to see their Indiana plant close within a year — has been told to great effect in the past, particularly in Mitt Romney's 1994 U.S. Senate race against the late Ted Kennedy. The company kept adding other firms to its rolls, amassing debt while several hundred workers were laid off between 1995 and 1999. The company went into bankruptcy in 2000, holding a debt load of more than $400 million. Bain's return on its $5 million investment was $100 million.
But a final bankruptcy filing on the firm in last December also shows what happened to Ampad creditors. Out of a debt load of $170 million owed to unsecured creditors, Ampad ended up paying out less than $330,000, the filings show. That amounts to two-tenths of a cent for every dollar owed in that case.
Alex Burns notes the trickiness of economic populism, which as First Read explains, plays "very well" in the Industrial Midwest:
The challenge for the Obama camp is figuring out how to drive the Bain message without provoking a full-blown revolt among elites who matter when it comes to fundraising and the national-level media narrative. Because as First Read also points out, Republicans will now make a mantra out of the phrase: "Even Democratic Newark Mayor Cory Booker has called these types of attack unfair…"
Elsewhere, the RNC goes after Biden on coal.
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