But the group running the video, the pro-Gingrich “super PAC” Winning Our Future, made no move to alter the work. Late Friday, it released an open letter to Mr. Romney saying it would alter its advertisement only if he would answer a series of questions about “your version of events,” including when he formally relinquished a “controlling interest” in Bain and when he received a final check from Bain relating to any investment in which he had an interest.
The video — parts of which first showed up online last week and on South Carolina television stations on Thursday — is dominating the campaign dialogue as the primary fight intensifies in the state.
By calling for the ads to come down or undergo changes, Mr. Gingrich was potentially getting to have his cake and eat it too, reaping the benefits of attacks that have been nationally branded as false while publicly distancing himself. Yet he also faced the risks of being associated with an attack by a group that has a former close aide, Rick Tyler, as a senior adviser.
The harsh nature of the film’s attacks had led many Republicans to call on Mr. Gingrich to disavow it. First pressed to do so last week, Mr. Gingrich declined, saying the use of the video is fair game, especially after a group supporting Mr. Romney, Restore Our Future, savaged him with ads in Iowa.
But in questioning the advertisements’ accuracy on Friday, Mr. Gingrich was providing an early test of the benefits and risks to political candidates like him who, with little of their own financing, are being sustained by super PACS, which can use unlimited resources to help candidates and attack their opponents as long as the campaigns do not coordinate with them.
So far, these groups are running nearly as many advertisements per day as the candidates themselves, according to an analysis by Kantar Media/CMAG, which reports that they are spending far more than the actual campaigns because they do not get the same discounted rates from stations that candidates get. Winning Our Future is heavily in the mix, having received a $5 million commitment from the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
Mr. Gingrich’s comments on Friday came after a host of news reports disputed the film’s accuracy, including The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column, which gave it the worst possible rating of “Four Pinocchios.”
The video, “King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” is riddled with inaccuracies, half-truths and omissions, according to a review of corporate documents and interviews with industry analysts.
The film is a political screed in the classic sense, a digital prosecution against Mr. Romney as a “corporate raider” whose business was “killing jobs for big financial rewards.” Over forbidding music, the baritone announcer says, “Nothing was spared; nothing mattered but greed.”
But Mr. Romney was not counted among the infamous corporate raiders of the 1980s, like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky. While his claim on the campaign trail to have created a net 100,000 jobs has come under question, and many did lose jobs because of Bain’s dealings, Mr. Romney’s tenure there was not marked by the wholesale liquidation of businesses that the film suggests.
“They are not pillagers,” Steven N. Kaplan, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago, said of Bain. “They were operational engineers.” If anything, he said, Bain Capital stood out from its rivals in the 1980s and 1990s for eschewing quick-fix financial wizardry that drained companies of assets. Instead, it favored building teams of experienced industry experts who could turn companies around.Yet in the first detailed case it presents, the film blames Mr. Romney for the personal pain caused by a washing machine plant closing in Florida. But that closing took place several years after Mr. Romney left Bain — and after Bain had sold the business, which it had bought from Raytheon, to the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan.
A woman interviewed in the film asserts unchallenged that Mr. Romney has 15 homes; he has 3.
The film also suggests that “Romney and Bain” greedily extracted tens of millions of dollars from KB Toys, tipping the retailer into bankruptcy, leading to 15,000 layoffs and driving the 80-year-old chain out of business. But Mr. Romney had retired from Bain Capital in early 1999, about a year before the firm purchased KB Toys, making the movie’s claims that Mr. Romney “bought” the chain incorrect.
The film strongly suggests that KB’s 2004 bankruptcy was caused by “staggering” debt created by Bain, which as the chain’s owner gave itself a hefty payout with borrowed money.
But that is an oversimplification. While the borrowing did hurt KB’s finances, the chain had been struggling for years and ultimately fell victim to a vicious price war in 2003 between discount chains like Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us, which began selling toys at below cost. KB called this “the single overwhelming factor” that undermined its business in a bankruptcy filing.
To further build the case that Bain had misbehaved, the film says that the firm’s profit from the KB deal “was described by The Boston Herald as disgusting,” leaving the impression that the newspaper had run an editorial that was critical of the transaction.
In fact, it did not. The Herald ran a news article that quoted a laid-off KB employee calling Bain’s profit from the investment “disgusting,” a distinction that the movie deliberately masks to give a single employee’s assertion greater authority.
The movie provides little, if any, information about the companies and their fate beyond a few facts and figures. But what it leaves out is at times crucial to seeing the long-term impact of Bain’s actions.
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