Bain Capital

GLEN ALLEN, Va. -- Apparently, there will be no apology. President Obama's response to rival Mitt Romney's repeated requests for those two little words was clear on Saturday. As the president campaigned across Virginia, Obama kept up the attacks on Romney's tenure at Bain Capital, accusing the Republican of investing in companies that “pioneered” the practice of shipping jobs overseas. “I don't want a pioneer in outsourcing. I want some in-sourcing,” Obama said as he stood, soaked, in a downpour at an outdoor rally in Glen Allen, a suburb of Richmond.

Wolfeboro, N.H. - With his vice presidential pick looming and a foreign trip a little more than a week away, Mitt Romney cut away from the campaign trail Saturday for family time at his lakeside retreat. After a difficult week, the unofficial Republican nominee spent the morning working outside on his iPad in a dress shirt and jeans. He escaped in the afternoon for a boat ride with his family on Lake Winnipesaukee. Romney was not expected to make any public appearances after a week in which he was hammered by Democrats amid new questions about the timing of his departure from Bain Capital, the venture capital firm he cofounded.

As Mitt Romney prepared for a series of network television interviews, President Obama said Friday that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee should answer questions about his tenure at Bain Capital. "Now, my understanding is that Mr. Romney attested to the SEC, multiple times, that he was the chairman, CEO and president of Bain Capital,  and I think most Americans figure if you are the chairman, CEO and president of a company that you are responsible for what that company does," Obama said in an interview with WJLA, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C. The interview, one of several Obama did with local television reporters Friday, were not scheduled to air until the weekend, but after word that Romney would be appearing Friday evening on each of the major television news networks, the Obama campaign released a portion of the transcript of the interview with WJLA reporter Scott Thuman.

Mitt Romney accused President Obama on Friday of stooping to reckless and undignified campaign tactics, saying he was spreading false information to tarnish his rival's record as chief executive of a Boston private equity firm. Romney, who rarely takes questions from the news media, made his remarks in an extraordinary round of hastily arranged TV interviews Friday with ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News and CNN. His sudden willingness to speak with every major TV news outlet was part of Romney's effort to contain the damage from Democrats' attacks on his record at the helm of Bain Capital, the firm where he built a personal fortune of as much as $250 million.

WASHINGTON -- The fallout continues after the Boston Globe's report Thursday noting that Bain Capital documents indicate Mitt Romney was still with the company after 1999, and Romney campaign surrogate Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia demanded that President Obama's campaign end its ads attacking Romney's time with the company. “ All of these attacks are things that happened after Mitt Romney left as the managing director of Bain.… To the degree that there is any truth to these sorts of outsourcing allegations, they happened after 1999 when he was not the managing director,” McDonnell, often mentioned as a possible vice presidential candidate, said.

This post has been updated, as indicated below. Online pundits continued to joust Friday over when Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital ended, reacting to a series of reports (e.g., here , here , here and here ) that Romney remained involved in Bain's investments after he left the company in February 1999. That just goes to show you -- the Washington Post isn't as powerful as it used to be. More important for Romney, it's a reminder that what makes sense on Wall Street doesn't necessarily play well in the reductive world of American politics.

WASHINGTON - President Obama's campaign pounced on the chance to spend another day questioning Mitt Romney's business record, lobbing personal attacks on the former chief executive and derailing Republican attempts to keep voters focused on Obama's economic record. The issue Thursday, at least among the chattering classes, was precisely how long Romney sat at the helm of Bain Capital, the Boston-based venture capital group that he founded in 1984 and that provided the bulk of his fortune.

A Wall Street Journal column. A post on the Drudge Report. Can entreaties from the Republican base convince Mitt Romney to choose former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as his running mate, and, perhaps more important, persuade her to accept? Likely answer? It's not happening. Or was this just a push in the conservative press to change the conversation to anything but Bain Capital, where, according to a news story in the Boston Globe on Thursday, Mitt Romney was still showing up on corporate filings as the chief executive for three years after he said he left the firm in 1999?

Determined not to let a recent slate of attacks on Mitt Romney's financial and job history slide quietly into the weekend, Democrats stepped up their attacks on Friday, again criticizing Romney for his failure to release his tax returns. Releasing the returns, Democrats say, would help evaluate the legitimacy of a Boston Globe story published Thursday that said Romney remained involved in managing Bain Capital after he left in 1999, a tidbit reporters got from SEC documents showing him as chairman in 2002.