Obama ads attack Romney as ‘outsourcer-in-chief’

President Obama is releasing ads in Iowa, Ohio and Virginia that rely on a recent Washington Post story to argue that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney would be an outsourcer-in-chief.

“The Washington Post has just revealed that Romney’s companies were pioneers in shipping U.S. jobs overseas,” each ad says.

The story reported that “[d]uring the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories.”

Each ad begins with a clip from one of Romney’s recent “100 Days” ads, in which Romney revealed some of his plans for his first term. Those ads were tailored for various swing states, and Obama’s ads are too.

The Ohio ad focuses on Romney’s claim that he would stand up to China on his first day in office. “Romney’s never stood up to China,” the narrator says. “All he’s ever done is send them our jobs.”

The Virginia and Iowa ads highlight Romney’s job promises and ask if the state wants “an outsourcer-in-chief in the White House?”

“President Obama continues to use false and discredited attacks to divert attention from his abysmal economic record,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in response to the ad campaign. “If President Obama had even half of Mitt Romney’s record on jobs, he’d be running on it.”

Romney’s campaign argued that the story conflates outsourcing to companies within the United States with offshoring to companies overseas and with support overseas for U.S. companies.

Previous Obama ad campaigns focused on Romney’s work at Bain Capital have been met with blowback from some Democrats who saw them as demonizing private equity. So far, Obama’s focus on outsourcing has not gotten the same criticism, but these are his first ads on the topic.