Romney Gets Another Layoff Blast

The name of Mitt Romney and the word layoffs are coming  up together a lot in the last few weeks. As you may recall from some of our earlier coverage he tried to deflect some of the blame from himself by telling people that the president was responsible for the 2007 recession, a year before he came to  the office of president. The president made it a point in public to remind voters that Mr. Romney has had no problem laying off staff himself. Here is an excerpt from that coverage:

“President Obama, for his part, did make some remarks about Mitt Romney and his own history with layoffs. President Obama said according to autoblog, “ We know what Mitt Romney did when 1.4 million jobs were on the line – he opposed the rescue loan the president extended to avoid liquidation, and made clear he would let Detroit go bankrupt. It’s no wonder he did that, because when he was a corporate buyout specialist, he laid off thousands of workers, closed factories and outsourced jobs solely in order to create profits for himself and his partners.”

Well it looks like Mr. Romney is taking flack for his job cutting behavior not only from the opposing party, but also from others in his own party. This time it was Jon Huntsman who was firing against Mr. Romney’s tactics. As a part of his primary campaign he has been pointing out to workers and voters in the state that Romney has made layoffs happen in the past.

“Jon Huntsman’s campaign said Wednesday that jobs lost at a company managed by rival Mitt Romney counter his claims of being a job creator,” a reporter from the Associated Press told its readers. “Huntsman’s campaign and allies said Romney’s venture capital firm oversaw more than 100 layoffs in New Hampshire while it eventually reaped millions in profits.”

That could cause particular problems for the New Hampshire primary elections which will take place in January. Mr. Romney has been working hard to give the impression to voters that he is a man who can create jobs for the people, and these multiple reminders of his willingness to let go of staff in order to make a large profit for the management of the company is not really compatible with that idea at all.

One of the people who was making these points for Huntsman was were Scott Pope, former mayor of Claremont NH, and they were out in full force. According to a reporter for the Boston Globe the following was said, “Pope said the reason he was given for the closure was that the company was going to move plant operations to Mexico. Asked by a reporter whether this was simply the free market at work, Pope said the president has a responsibility to provide opportunity for people. And he said, while Romney has talked about creating jobs, ‘What I saw in the past, that didn’t happen.'”

Spokespeople for Romney are instead of saying any real defense was to say the following to a reporter for the Associated Press, President Obama and his friends on the left are continuing their attacks on the free-enterprise system, and by attacking free enterprise they are willingly dividing Americans. Mitt Romney has a quarter-century of experience working with entrepreneurs and real businesses in the real economy.”

Please note, they never said anything about his actual history with laying off workers at all.