Update: As pointed out by readers on the now-going-viral Facebook post regarding this and on Hot Air, the woman also had other health insurance after her husband lost his job. The lie grows.
If you expected this election cycle to be tame, even for a little while longer, you were wrong. Priorities USA, the pro-Obama Super PAC which has the blessing of the President, is run by close confidantes of the President and is even going to receive fundraising help from Bill Clinton, is now running an ad effectively accusing Romney of murder. The claim stems from a man losing his health insurance because a company Romney and Bain Capital tried to save eventually went under. The ad:
The ad centers around the story of Joe and Ranae Soptic of Kansas City, Missouri. Joe lost his job when GST Steel went under in 2001, after 8 years of Bain Capital attempting to save the dying steel plant. Romney’s site addresses the claims regarding GST:
In 1993, GS Technologies, a company Bain Capital had invested in, purchased a struggling Kansas City steel plant from Armco. Prior to this investment, Armco announced plans to close the Kansas City plant if a buyer could not be found.
This investment – and $170 million in upgrades – kept the Kansas City plant competitive in a tough international market and saved the steel workers’ jobs for eight years.
In addition, the plant finally went under 2 years after Romney left Bain Capital to head up the Salt Lake City Olympics. Even if you believe the Obama campaign’s fact-checked and disproven claim that Romney left Bain in 2002, it would be obscene to blame Romney and Bain when the investment was designed to save GST Steel.
Now, the kicker that makes this the most offensive ad I have seen in a long time (although not in history, as a 2010 ad compared one GOP candidate to the Taliban). Soptic’s wife died in 2006, five years after he lost his job and health insurance with GST’s closing. When she went in for pneumonia, her cancer was so far evolved that it was untreatable, making health care irrelevent. The argument is basically that “some guy, who once worked for a company managed by the company Romney managed, lost his wife to cancer, so Mitt Romney killed her.” This is ridiculous. President Obama should immediately disown this ad, but I doubt that’s going to happen.