Hypocrite Obama hits Romney over Bain connection, but ignores his own

In a new ad out this week from Barack Obama's re-election campaign, the president blaming Mitt Romney and Bain Capital for job losses in the steel industry.

Bain took over GS Technologies in 1993 and the steel company declared bankruptcy in 2001. The ad features former steel workers lamenting about what happened to their company. "We view Romney as a job destroyer," one worker says. The campaign spot also adds a bit of class warfare into the mix: "Those guys [Romney, Bain, etc.] were all rich. They all had more money than they'll ever spend, yet they didn't have the money to take care of the very people that made the money for them."

WATCH:

It's worth noting, however, that Romney left Bain prior to the company's bankruptcy in 1999 to manage the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Perhaps even more noteworthy is President Obama's own connection to the venture capital firm which he criticizes so harshly. While Romney wasn't a part of Bain when GS Technologies went bankrupt, Jonathan Lavine was.  Lavine -- a top Obama bundler -- is managing director at Bain Capital and scraped together more than $100,000 for President Obama's campaign in 2011.

Hmm... They had more money than they'll ever spend, yet they didn't have the money to take care of the very people that made the money for them...

You really have to appreciate the galling hypocrisy of President Obama.

NRO's Robert Costa also notes:

So according to the Obama team’s logic, Romney, who had left Bain, is responsible for GST Steel’s demise, but Lavine, who was there, is not?

Despite the glaring hypocrisy, the Obama camp plans to run the "Steel" ad in a handful of swing states -- Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Virginia.

In related news...

President Obama’s in New York City today, doing two pricey fundraisers, with tickets going for $5,000 and $35,800 respectively. And apparently, it occurred to his campaign that attacking Wall Street vehemently the day of high-dollar fundraisers wasn’t a smart move.

So during a conference call today attacking Mitt Romney for the GST Steel bankruptcy and layoffs (which occurred two years after Romney had ended his involvement in the day-to-day workings of Bain), Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter was quick to stress that it wasn’t that the administration objected to private equity firms. “No one is questioning the private equity industry as a whole,” Cutter said, even as she laid the blame for the layoffs at Romney’s feet, saying that he lacked the values to be president and had shown himself incapable of caring about the middle class.

So, in other words, it’s okay – great, even – to be a private equity investor and have the wrong values about middle class people until you decide to stop writing checks and start running for office.