In his latest web attack video on Barack Obama, Mitt Romney cited comments by Steven Rattner, who had served as the 'car czar' under Obama, that defended Romney's record with Bain Capital. On MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell, however, Rattner makes it very clear that Romney was not a job creator with Bain or at any other point in his career. Ratner described Romney's claims about being a job creator as "silly," "contradictory," based on "false accounting," "about maximizing profits," and "misleading."
MITCHELL: Many people believe that what Mitt Romney has done in claiming he is a job creator and that is his record from Bain Capital is as you point out, silly and contradictory because Bain Capital was not in business to create jobs, they were in business to make money for investors. At the same time, was he that eager, so eager, to avoid being tagged as the former Massachusetts governor? That he doesn't want to talk about the Massachusetts record for probably a number of reasons but also because that is not what he wants to be his calling card. He wants to be the businessman, the guy who can get things done, who can fix it, not... that liberal Massachusetts record, which is the sort of stereotype.
RATTNER: Well that liberal Massachusetts record and, of course, there's the point that Massachusetts was 47th in job creation when he was governor…. he seems to much prefer to be thought of as a business guy. I would have no problem with that. I think business is a useful experience, not saying it qualifies you to be president but as he said, it's part of life's experience. It’s when he reweaves history and tries to turn a perfectly respectable business career into some idea he was the world's greatest job creator that I think he is misleading people.
MITCHELL: The Republicans including the other day when I was interviewing Eric Fehrnstrom claim that Mitt Romney has created more net jobs in his role as a governor and as a Bain Capital executive than President Obama has for the entire nation. And it just seems like that's really false accounting because he's counting every job that Bain Capital ever created before or after he even left the company and every job that was lost in the national economy during that first month or two when President Obama took it over when it was still recording the results .. of the Bush record.
RATTNER: That's exactly right. You know the old joke about “lies, damn lies and statistics.” You can do whatever you want with numbers. To start with Romney's numbers, you're correct that most of those 100,000 jobs actually are Staples. 90,000 of those 100,000 jobs are a small investment that Bain Capital made in the late 1980s in Staples. Staples went public a few years later when it had 1,100 employees. when Romney left it had 40,000 employees but he's taking credit for all 90,000. The flipside is when president Obama runs an ad talking about jobs that were lost at a steel company that Bain invested in, Romney says well I wasn’t there then, I was gone already.
