Romney Set to Counterattack on Bain

The L word.

Image by JASON REED / Reuters

The Romney campaign will begin to aggressively push back against President Obama’s accusations that the Republican was an “outsourcing pioneer” today, a source privy to the the campaign’s strategy told BuzzFeed.

In a conference call Monday morning, senior staff said Romney’s surrogates would stop shying away from the word “lie” in responding to Democrats’ attacks on his business record, and plan to go on TV to call Obama a “liar,” the source said.

“They are very fed up with these attacks,” said the source.

The pushback comes after a week of hand-wringing among GOP elite, who worry that Romney is letting Obama’s attacks — which seek to undermine the very rationale for the Republican’s candidacy, his private sector experience — gain traction without any serious effort to rebut them. Some Republican strategists have said Romney should be spending serious money to respond to the attacks.

“The feeling was that nobody is watching this right now,” said the source. “They had a time frame to respond to the Bain attacks… But today the counterattack with the surrogates is going to begin.”

The thrust of Obama’s attacks come from a Washington Post story published last month that revealed Bain Capital invested in companies that specialized in “helping other companies move or expand operations overseas.” Chicago seized on the revelations to advance a narrative that Romney made his fortune by advising companies on how to outsource jobs.

In response, Romney surrogates are going to make the case that most of the offshoring happened after the Republican left Bain, and that much of it was simply to help firms sell products overseas.

To spread the message, the source said, the campaign is going to start circulating a document to press that compiles “presidential falsehoods and exaggerations.”