Obama super PAC uses Olympics to attack Romney

Priorities USA Action, a super PAC supporting President Obama, is out with a new ad using the Olympics to attack his presumptive Republican rival Mitt Romney.

The ad will run in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia as part of a $20 million buy.

Romney is headed to London for the Olympics this week; Democrats hope to use the event to remind voters of the candidate’s wealth and career rather than his success in running the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games.

Over video of the Republican candidate walking into the 2002 opening ceremony, “Romney’s Gold” ties him to outsourcing in China, India and Burma, and financial shenanigans in Switzerland, Bermuda, and the Cayman Islands.

“Ya gotta say this about Mitt Romney,” the narrator concludes. “He sure knows how to go for the gold ... for himself.”

The new attack ad stems from a recent Huffington Post story that the 2002 Winter Olympics supervised by the former Massachusetts governor outsourced purchase of uniforms to Burma. The outsourcing itself isn’t that controversial — the U.S. opening ceremony uniforms for this year’s London Olympics were made in China. But human rights activists were outraged that the United States would contract work to Burma’s brutal military dictatorship. The military rulers of Burma have since carried out several political reforms, leading Washington to relax some trade restrictions against the Southeast Asian country.

The other accusations have appeared in other ads. Companies invested in by Bain Capital, the private venture firm Romney founded, outsourced to China and India. Much of the outsourcing occurred after Romney left Bain (to run the Olympics), but critics argue that Romney still had a role in the firm.

Romney does own an offshore company in Bermuda that was not listed on his financial reports, has owned a Swiss bank account and holds investments in the Cayman Islands. All of that goes toward the picture Obama and his allies hope to paint of Romney as exotic — an image bolstered by his appearance at the opening ceremony of the Olympics.