“This is not a distraction,” Barack Obama said when challenged on his attacks on private equity and Mitt Romney.  “This is what this campaign is going to be about.”  American Crossroads takes Obama at his word, pushing out a new 60-second spot called “Public Equity” today to remind voters how Obama scores against his own stated metrics:

American Crossroads communication director Jonathan Collegio says, “If President Obama wants to attack private equity, that’s fine – but let’s open up his failed record as a public equity investor, where jobs were lost and taxpayers were left holding the bag.”  This follows up on Will Cain’s exchange with Debbie Wasserman Schultz last week, in which he challenged the DNC chair to distinguish between Bain Capital’s downsizing and rescue of businesses with Obama’s track record in their highly-touted automaker bailout:

Yet a little later in the interview she was stumped. “Let’s compare apples to apples,” the other CNN host said to the DNC chair. “It seems to me the criticism you’re offering is that Mitt Romney went into businesses and laid people off. But wouldn’t the apples to apples comparison be that’s exactly what Barack Obama did when he touts the auto industry as a feather in his cap, didn’t the federal government and Barack Obama go in and layoff thousands of autoworkers to save that industry?”

Wasserman Schultz then ducked by changing the topic.

The difference is that Romney had a track record of overwhelming success at turning around troubled organizations and creating explosive expansion.  As the ad points out, Obama has a track record of losing investor money by funding the operations of cronies and politically-attractive businesses that investors have shunned — for good reasons, as it turns out.  If that’s what this election is about, then Obama should start planning to write his memoirs starting on January 21st of next year.