Pro-Gingrich super PAC to air anti-Romney video
Film says GOP front-runner's former investment firm put thousands of Americans out of work
The pro-Gingrich super PAC’s plans to air excerpts from the 27-minute movie in South Carolina represents a major escalation in the war of rival super PACs that is shaping the GOP race.
The slickly made movie focuses on Romney’s years as the chief officer of Bain Capital, featuring interviews with workers who allegedly lost their jobs — and had their homes foreclosed — as a result of the firm’s corporate buyouts.
“Then we have this company that comes in and destroys everything that we ever worked for,” says one woman talking about Bain Capital’s closure of plants run by American Pad & Paper Company in Florida. “He took away our livelihoods. He took away our future.”
Interspersed are shots of Romney saying “corporations are people, my friend,” a photo of Romney’s “$12 million California beach house” and a photo of a smiling Romney in a business suit having his shoes polished on an airplane runway.
In a sense, the hard-hitting ad is political payback. Gingrich saw his support in Iowa cut in half — from a front-running 26 percent in early December to a disappointing fourth-place finish with 13 percent in this week’s caucuses — after a three-week ad blitz by a pro-Romney super PAC that attacked him for ethics violations and political flip-flops.
The movie was made by Jason Killian Meath, a former associate in the firm of Stu Stevens,
Romney’s longtime chief ad man. Meath worked on ads for Romney’s campaign in 2008. (Meith did not respond to a request for email comment Saturday.)
As first reported Friday night by Peter Boyer of The Daily Beast, the movie was commissioned by Barry Bennett, a conservative activist who heads Alliance for America’s Future, a group whose principals include Mary Cheney, a daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, and which does not disclose its donors.
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