President Bill Clinton gave an interview to Judy Woodruff and tried to explain his comments about Mitt Romney and his “steller” experience with Bain Capital. Woodruff asked Clinton, “So before I ask you about CGI, is the Obama campaign wrong to continue to criticize Romney’s record at Bain Capital?” Clinton answered, “Not necessarily. It depends on the facts of the case. That’s what I tried to say in the CNN interview. The equity business can be good if you – I’ve got a friend who buys failing companies, and he tries to turn them around. And he’s turned a bunch of them around, but not all of them. So sometimes he tried and failed. The effort was honorable. That’s a good thing. There are lots of examples over the last 20 years where people used equity to take control of companies, got the companies in greater debt, looted the assets, caused more people to be fired and, in some cases, compromised the pensions. That’s a bad thing. That’s where you’re just — you’re buying something and looting it because you can.
I didn’t have any idea, when I was giving that answer, that I was wading into some controversy in the campaign, because I haven’t seen the ads, and I’m not following it, and I’m not really part of it. But you’d have to know about a specific case to know whether it was a good or a bad thing. But there are a lot of good people in that business doing good things. That’s the point I was making.”