Obama ad steel worker should point to Democrats for his wife’s death

An example of a Romney campaign response; this video features a small business owner who in fact did "build that." The video relates to President Barack Obama's earlier speech promoting tenets of state socialism.

A PAC apparently bent on reelecting President Barack Obama by any means, Priorities USA, served up a helping of misery with an ad featuring a man who first lost his job at a steel plant and then lost his wife to cancer. Ironically, the Democrats who created the video omitted their own party's role in the death, if the Obama PAC's standards are equally applied.

In a video made by the PAC, Joe Soptic blamed a company former Gov. Mitt Romney had worked for, Bain Capital.

At present, the official Obama campaign has attempted to wash its hands of the whole affair.

That would only work in a fairy tale, however, because the Obama campaign had featured Soptic in earlier videos. Democrats routinely suffer amnesia.

Fact is, environmental politics and labor unions on the Left—both associated with Obama and the Democrats—helped kill that steel mill and other manufacturing entities in the U.S.

The National Center for Manufacturing Sciences explained the steel industry's challenges on environmental compliance and profits in a backgrounder [boldface added]:

Steel prices are typically in the range of a few hundred dollars per ton, but the amount per ton that companies must spend on environmental operating costs is about the same order of magnitude -- in fact, is slightly bigger than -- their typical profit margin on that ton.  Managing environmental costs are survival issues for firms in the iron and steel sector today.

Notwithstanding its sizable investment in environmental infrastructure, the iron and steel sector is still one of the nation's biggest energy users, and still one of the biggest emitters of criteria air pollutants and greenhouse gases, of all U. S. industrial sectors.  Its impact remains considerable, and further improvements in environmental performance would be significant.  The question is, how much more room does the sector have to give?

Among all the environmental standards that apply to the iron and steel industry, air quality regulations have had the most profound effect on the sector since the age of environmental regulation began in earnest (ca. 1970). 

The enviro-lobby aside, the Obama PAC also omitted some other information from the ad, as Fox News and other media noted:

However, the ad hides details about the timeline of those events. Soptic's wife died five years after GST filed for bankruptcy. His wife reportedly had her own health insurance after Soptic left GST. And Romney had long since left Bain Capital at the time of her death.

Environmental concerns are often exaggerated by groups reliant on fundraising. Such groups rarely focus on one of the largest factors in health, indoor air quality.

However, with the rigid legal and statutory framework manufacturers must operate in here, it’s a wonder there are any factories left at all. The ransacking of Gibson Guitars comes to mind.

Instead of painting a Republican challenger as Soptic’s wife’s killer, the Obama PAC should be pointing fingers at groups within their own ranks, including unions.

In the late 1990s, GST workers went on a strike that cost the company $22 million in lost business.  The Kansas City Business Journal has a fascinating article that offers a look at the power labor unions have over manufacturing concerns in forced unionism states.

Basically, it all boils down to this—if you want to hype some melodrama purely for political gain, Democrats killed Soptic’s wife.

(Commentary by Kay B. Day/August 9, 2012)

Gibson Guitar raid penalizes American company for foreign forestry practices (The US Report)

Obama Campaign Feigns Ignorance About Romney Attack (Commentary)

NYTimes Editorial Page Silent on False Obama Super PAC Ad; Blasted Ricketts Ad That Never Ran (Breitbart)

Read past articles at TUSR about Gibson Guitars.