Our boy Mitt is in his other-other-other home state of Michigan, where he’s expressing his view of the state’s unemployment problem — a view that differs greatly from that of John McCain. McCain is telling people that jobs that have been sent overseas are “not coming back,” but ever the optimist, Romney takes exception with McCain’s sad sack stance:

At an unscheduled press conference in front of a General Motors factory where 200 employees were recently laid off, Romney said that he wasn’t there to criticize GM for making a necessary business decision but that he was tired of Washington not doing enough for the domestic automobile industry.

“You hear some say that these are jobs that are just going away and we better get used to it, but where does it stop?” Romney asked. “Is there a point at which someone says you know that’s enough? Or are we gonna let the entire automobile industry — domestic manufacturer automotive industry — disappear and just say, ‘Well that was tough, that’s just the way it is.’ That’s not what I believe.”

As he has stumped around Michigan, Romney has been criticizing John McCain for saying that some lost automobile industry jobs are not going to come back to Michigan.

So it’s clear that Mitt stands strongly on the side of the American worker, right? Sure! And just to show you how much Mitt cares for the working class, I’d like to remind you of some of his professional history.

The Boston Phoenix

In fact, Bain Capital under Romney frequently rewarded those at the top, and paid itself millions in consulting fees (see, “Guaranteed Profits”), even when, beneath them, their companies turned to dust. Despite a reputation for wise corporate guidance — observers have always considered Bain Capital’s management-consulting prowess its strength compared with other LBO firms — many of its companies withered after Romney’s team cashed out. Stage Stores, DDi, KB Toys, Babbages, Holson-Burnes, Dade-Behring — they all collapsed. But by the time they did, Romney and his team had already made money for themselves, their investors, their executive teams, and their bankers, legal consultants, and accountants.

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While showering execs with bonuses and stock options, Bain was typically slashing costs elsewhere, through layoffs and budget reductions.

One of the best-known examples is Dallas-based American Pad & Paper (AmPad), which Bain Capital bought in 1992. During Romney’s unsuccessful campaign for the US Senate in 1994, Ted Kennedy assailed him for Bain’s ruthless firing of hundreds of AmPad employees — and then offering to rehire some of them at lower wages and fewer benefits.

Bain Capital and its investors made more than $100 million on AmPad, even though the company eventually filed for bankruptcy.

This was hardly atypical. Bain Capital’s record shows the same treatment for many companies: slashing jobs, benefits, research-and-development budgets, and other items to show quick profitability before selling or taking the company’s stock public.

The Los Angeles Times

From 1984 until 1999, Romney led Bain Capital, a Boston-based private equity group that earned jaw-dropping profits through leveraged buyouts, debt hedge funds, offshore tax havens and other financial strategies. In some cases, Romney’s team closed U.S. factories, causing hundreds of layoffs, or pocketed huge fees shortly before companies collapsed.

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Making his first bid for elected office, Romney boasted that he had helped create more than 10,000 jobs at companies he had retooled. But Kennedy painted him as someone “who puts profits over people,” and an ugly labor dispute soon helped sink Romney’s campaign.

Bain Capital had bought a controlling interest in a paper products company called Ampad for $5 million in 1992. Two years later, after Ampad bought a factory in Marion, Ind., the new management team dismissed about 200 workers, slashed salaries and benefits, and hired strikebreakers after the union called a walkout.

“We were just fired,” Randy Johnson, a former worker and union officer at the Marion plant, recalled in a telephone interview. “They came in and said, ‘You’re all fired. If you want to work for us, here’s an application.’ We had insurance until the end of the week. That was it. It was brutal.”

In October 1994, Johnson and other striking workers drove to Massachusetts to protest Romney’s Senate campaign. “We chased him everywhere,” Johnson recalled. “He took good jobs with benefits, and created low-wage, part-time, no-benefit jobs. That’s what he was creating with his investments.”

At first, Romney tried to justify the Indiana layoffs as necessary in “the real world.” He then sought to distance himself, arguing that he took a leave of absence from Bain Capital before Ampad bought the factory. The dispute proved potent, however, and Kennedy trounced him in the election.

The New York Times

Citing his business experience, Mr. Romney has urged voters to reject “lifetime politicians” who “have never run a corner store, let alone the largest enterprise in the world.”

Mr. Romney, though, never ran a corner store or a traditional business. Instead, he excelled as a deal maker, a buyer and seller of companies, a master at the art of persuasion that he demonstrated in the talks that led to the forming of Bain Capital.

“Mitt ran a private equity firm, not a cement company,” Eric A. Kriss, a former Bain Capital partner, told The Times. “He was not a businessman in the sense of running a company,” Mr. Kriss said, adding, “He was a great presenter, a great spokesman and a great salesman.”

But leveraged buyouts often lead to layoffs, a business reality that has impinged on Mr. Romney’s political hopes at least once before. In his 1994 campaign for the Senate, Mr. Romney’s efforts to unseat Edward M. Kennedy were derailed in part because of accusations that Bain Capital had fired union workers at an Indiana company it controlled. Mr. Kennedy’s campaign cut a series of commercials, focusing on laid-off workers, that cut to the quick. (Those ads are available on The Huffington Post.) Mr. Romney has said that he had nothing to do with the firings.

In an interview with The Times, Mr. Romney acknowledged that Bain Capital’s acquisitions has sometimes led to layoffs, but that he could explain them to voters.

“Sometimes the medicine is a little bitter but it is necessary to save the life of the patient,” he said. “My job was to try and make the enterprise successful, and in my view the best security a family can have is that the business they work for is strong.”

Yeah! Can you hear it? That sound rising from the factories and warehouses and docks of America… They’re calling your name, Mitt Romney, for you are the one true friend and hope of the worker! You are the Tom Joad of the 21st century!