President: Romney's Bain Record Is Fair Game

President Obama isn't backing down from his attacks on Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital. The focus on the private equity firm "is not a distraction. This is what this campaign is going to be about," he said at a press conference in Chicago yesterday. Romney's "main calling card for why he should be president is his business experience," said Obama. "When you're president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not simply to maximize profits."

If "your main argument for how to grow the economy was: 'I knew how to make a lot of money for investors,' then you're missing what this job is about," he said, adding that he wasn't attacking private equity as a practice, calling it a "healthy part of the free market," Politico reports. Cory Booker—who called the Bain ads "nauseating" over the weekend—continued to backpedal yesterday, saying he now believes the attacks were fair game because Obama "was not condemning any particular firms. He was focusing in on a guy who is bragging about his job creation record." (More President Obama stories.)