The Ohio senator tells Salon that Obama's private-equity attacks are working in his state
Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown has some advice for the Obama campaign: Ignore Bill Clinton and Corey Booker and keep up the attacks on Romney’s record at Bain Capital. “People in Ohio understand what this means,” he told Salon this weekend at the Netroots Nation conference in Providence, Rhode Island. “Private equity can be a good thing, but I’ve seen the damage it can do in places around the state,” he explained.
As a key swing state suffering from prolonged economic decline, Brown’s Ohio, perhaps more than any other, will be the battleground of this year’s Bain wars. The state seen much of the ad spending on both sides (the first two-minute Obama commercial ran only in the state), and after the conventional wisdom in New York and Washington concluded that the Bain attacks had failed, a recent poll found the message resonating in the Rust Belt state.
By a margin of 16 percentage points, the poll found more people in Ohio agreed that private equity firms “care only about profits and short-term gains for investors. When they come in, workers get laid off, benefits disappear and pensions are cut. Investors walk off with big returns, and working folks get stuck holding the bag.” Just 33 percent in the state said they thought the firms “helped.”
More here.
