Mitt Romney’s Bain tenure is fair game, National Governors Association chairman says

As Mitt Romney’s tenure at the helm of Bain Capital continues to be a focus on the campaign trail, the incoming chairman of the National Governors Association argued over the weekend that the presumptive GOP nominee’s private equity background should not be out-of-bounds.

Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D). (Alex Brandon/AP)“Of course it’s fair game,” Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D) said Saturday in an interview at the NGA’s annual conference in Williamsburg. “When you run and you’re pointing to your record in the private sector, your record in the private sector is fair game, just as your record in the public sector.”

Markell, who formally took the reins of the NGA on Sunday, has a private-sector background that bears some similarities to Romney’s. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and launched his business career as the 13th employee at telecommunications giant Nextel. He later worked at Comcast, McKinsey and Co. and First Chicago Corp. before winning election as state treasurer in 1998.

Markell pointed to some of the similarities between his own and Romney’s background and contended that “there’s a huge issue here of what is it that you learn from your experience in the private sector.”

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Mitt Romney attracts big donations from financial industry, including Goldman Sachs and Bain

Mitt Romney’s history in the financial industry is clearly an asset for his campaign when it comes to fundraising.

(Richard Drew - AP)

A new disclosure filing released Sunday night shows that the Republican presidential candidate’s biggest sources of cash in recent months have been top financial firms. Employees of Goldman Sachs Group alone have given $902,000 to Romney Victory, which is a joint fundraising vehicle for Romney and the Republican Party.

They are closely followed by employees of Bain Capital, the private equity firm that Romney founded and recently a target of Democratic attacks. Romney raised $820,000 from Bain Capital employees and another $175,000 from employees of the Bain & Co. consulting firm, the source of the top talent and business philosophy for the private equity partnership.

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Obama holds town hall in Ohio, Romney fundraises with Jindal | July 16 schedules

President Obama will highlight his bailout of the auto industry and attack Mitt Romney on taxes and overseas jobs Monday in Cincinatti.

Romney, meanwhile, will attend fundraisers in Baton Rouge, La., and Jackson Miss., with Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), whom many consider to be on the veepstakes short list.

Here’s your look at the campaigns’ schedules for Monday, July 16, from the candidates’ press offices and the PBS News Hour Political Calendar.

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Mitt Romney retired from Bain Capital ‘retroactively,’ Ed Gillespie says

Romney campaign senior adviser Ed Gillespie defended his candidate from attacks over the timing of his departure from Bain Capital during an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, saying Romney retired “retroactively” from the firm.

Romney has come under heavy fire from the Obama campaign and its Democratic allies recently due to the emergence of documents Bain filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that list Romney as chief executive until 2002, three years after he has said he left the company to head the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City.

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Obama campaign to Romney on Bain attacks: Stop whining

The Romney and Obama campaigns continued their jousting Sunday over an Obama campaign official’s charge last week about Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital involving either a lie or “a felony.”

Romney campaign officials and advisers were quick to portray Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter’s remark as disappointing and indicative of a viciousness in American politics that Obama took office pledging to end.

President Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.Cutter, speaking on CBS’ Face the Nation, said that she had not called Romney a felon, but insisted that he had either lied to the Securities and Exchange Commission when he said he left Bain Capital in 1999, or that he misrepresented his work overseeing the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

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Governors may push for delay of defense layoff notices until after election

This post has been updated.

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. – Health-care reform. Same-sex marriage. Illegal immigration. The social safety net.

When it comes to some of the top issues facing the states, it might seem that the partisan divide among the country’s governors is as wide as it has ever been.

But one area where the state executives appear to have found common ground is on the issue of defense cuts – specifically, the $500 billion in automatic defense cuts set into motion by last August’s bipartisan debt-reduction deal.

Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D), incoming chair of the National
Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D). Governors Association, said the governors likely won’t reach a consensus on how Congress and the White House should avoid those cuts. But Markell said a bipartisan agreement is in the works when it comes to delaying the issuing of layoff notices to workers who might be affected by the cuts.

“There has been some conversation about governors getting together to urge a delay in when the defense and other companies have to actually send out a notice about laying people off,” Markellsaid Saturday in an interview at the NGA’s annual conference. “My guess is you’re going to see Republicans and Democrats getting together suggesting this delay.”

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Ron Paul’s supporters make one last, fruitless push

GRAND ISLAND, Neb. — Though the battle for the Republican presidential nomination was over many weeks ago, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, supporters of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) put up one final push for their man here on Saturday — and came up short.

Paul’s forces had hoped to pull out a victory at the Nebraska
Ron Paul speaking at the University of California at Berkeley, Calif., in April , when he said he was done spending money on his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. (Ben Margot - AP) Republican convention, because winning a majority of delegates here would have guaranteed their candidate a speaking slot at the GOP convention in Tampa late next month.

Under party rules, a candidate cannot have his name entered into nomination at the convention unless he has won a majority of delegates in at least five states. Paul had won four.

So charged up were his supporters that some had feared mayhem here, and the party at one point hired extra security for its gathering at a golf club. But the convention turned out to be an orderly affair. Paul himself had appealed to his supporters to play nice.

It was “a very cordial, congenial convention,” said state GOP Chairman Mark Fahleson.

And one that turned out to be an overwhelming victory for the presumptive nominee, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

In the end, Paul won only two delegates, to Romney’s 32.

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Could Republican governors be the key to the 2012 presidential race? Maybe.

WILLIAMSBURG — As the general election nears, some have argued that President Obama may have Republican governors to thank for the fact that the unemployment rate in many swing states is below the national average.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R). (Scott Olson/Getty Images)But Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) argued Saturday that the improving economy in some states led by Republican governors could actually be a boon for presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

In a gaggle with reporters at the National Governors Association’s annual meeting, Walker seized on a new report by Examiner.com that shows among the 17 states that elected Republican governors in 2010, the unemployment rate has gone down since January 2011.

“In fact, it’s gone down substantially lower than the overall national unemployment rate,” Walker said. “I think that’s an important point, and that’s something that we touched on very briefly (among Republican governors Saturday morning) — that in swing states like Virginia, like Wisconsin, like Iowa, where the president’s coming in and trying to ride a little bit of the wave of better unemployment numbers, most of us point out that those unemployment numbers only started to go down dramatically after Republicans were elected as governor.”

A closer look at the report cited by Walker shows that the numbers can be interpreted as good news for both parties.

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DGA chairman O’Malley on Medicaid expansion: ‘Each governor has a unique set of challenges’

WILLIAMSBURG, Va. — Of the country’s 20 Democratic governors (plus Independent Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee), 13 — and Chafee — plan to fully implement the national health-care law’s Medicaid expansion, while seven have yet to make up their minds, USA Today reported earlier this week.

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley (D). (AP Photo/Brian Witte)So what does the chairman of the Democratic Governors Association make of the fact that in more than half a dozen states, Democratic governors are waiting to make a decision on whether they’ll implement a key aspect of President Obama’s signature health-care law?

“Every governor has a unique set of challenges; some have greater political challenges to overcome than others,” DGA chairman and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley told reporters Saturday at the National Governors Association annual meeting.

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