Outsourcing Becomes Toxic in U.S. Presidential Campaign ...

Outsourcing has never been a popular term in the Western countries that lose jobs to emerging markets, but it has become positively toxic in the current United States presidential campaign.

A new attack ad by President Barack Obama?s campaign calls his presumptive opponent, Mitt Romney, the ?Outsourcer in Chief,? The New York Times?s Caucus blog writes. ?Romney?s companies were pioneers at shipping U.S. jobs overseas,? the ad says, ?investing in firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.?

The role of Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mr. Romney led, in the outsourcing business came into sharp focus after a Washington Post article last week listed various investments Bain made in companies that moved jobs out of the United States.

?During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission,? the article said. While the article?s first sentence mentions moving jobs to ?low-wage countries like China and India,? it makes no further mention of India and refers mostly to manufacturing, not the services jobs in which India?s outsourcing companies specialize.

?At a fund-raiser in Atlanta, Mr. Obama derided Mr. Romney?s advisers for trying to distinguish between ?off-shoring? and outsourcing,? The New York Times wrote Tuesday. The president added cheerfully, ?I?m not kidding, that?s what they said.?

The Obama campaign, The New York Times article said, ?seems to be scenting blood on the outsourcing issue.? Mr. Obama?s camp is working hard to call attention to it: In Waterloo, Iowa, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. called Mr. Romney ?a job creator ? in Singapore. And China. And India.?

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