Have you seen the latest commercial from Priorities USA Action, the Democratic super PAC closely affiliated with the Obama campaign? It sticks a knife pretty deep into Mitt Romney’s craw by strongly linking the Republican candidate and his former investment company Bain Capital to the cancer-related death of former steelworker Joe Soptic’s wife. (Soptic appeared in an earlier, hard-hitting Priorities USA Action ad that also seeing renewed interest this morning).

In the ad, Soptic, a former employee of GST Steel in Kansas City—he worked there for 30 years—speaks about his life after the steel plant was shut down under Bain’s ownership.

“When Mitt Romney and Bain closed the plant, I lost my healthcare, and my family lost their healthcare. And a short time after that my wife became ill,” Soptic says in the ad,

Is it fair to say the Mitt Romney had anything to do—personally—with this woman’s death? That’s, of course, pretty debatable stuff, but this is entirely the point, that the country debate the matter. All’s fair in love, war and politics and it’s not like Romney’s ads are any “truthier.”

It’s nice to see these issues raised. At last.

On that level, I think it’s fair politics to remind people that Mitt Romney will take away their healthcare in the unlikely event he’s elected President. I also think it’s well within the bounds of the rules of politics as it is played today to link Romney to the real world wreckage that Bain left in its wake. Even if he left Bain before Mrs Soptic’s illness, it’s the entire culture of vulture capitalism that should be called to task when lives and entire communities are destroyed to enrich fat cats like Thurston Howell III Mitt Romney.

Of course conservatives, Libertarians and free marketeers will say that this is how capitalism is supposed to work, creative destruction and pricing efficiency and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

Tell that to Joe Soptic. He knows it’s all bullshit.

Free enterprise, free market… free to die like a dog in Mitt Romey’s America. Don’t tread on me!

I thought LOLGOP nailed the reason why this commercial is so effective, and why it’s got so many conservatives seeing red. Via Eclectablog:

This new Priorities USA ad finally makes the connections between a lack of financial stability, a lack of health insurance and death. Yes, death. People die because they lack health insurance and more will die if Romney wins and the Affordable Care Act is repealed. That point needs to be made.

This woman died because she lacked insurance. Like too many Americans, she waited till the last possible moment to seek care. And since we all pay for each other’s health care, we ending paying for a huge percentage of it during the last days when little can be done. Is this Mitt Romney’s fault? No. Does he want to take health care away from millions of Americans? Absolutely.

And Republicans are furious that someone is finally saying that Americans die because of our insane health care system and more will die if Romney wins. Conservatives are willing to use the threat of death by foreign interest to scare you into anything they want. But use the real life fear of what actually kills us and suddenly you’ve gone too far.

Now is the time to go too far, then. Because what the Republicans are planning means that we’ll pay more for health care and get less of it. And Americans will die. We can prevent that if we’re willing to say what’s at stake.

Bingo.

There’s another, (slightly) more subtle message in the ad that echoes something The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote this morning about Romney’s bigger picture problem with Bain and the MIA tax returns:

The question is not whether he did well, or whether he did it legally, but whether he did it with any sense of ethics.

Romney almost certainly didn’t break the law by putting his money in Switzerland or the Bahamas, or by paying an income tax rate of 15 percent. He didn’t necessarily break any laws by creating a $100 million 401(k). 

The question is whether such things are fair, or whether Romney has exploited a system that allows rich people like him to get richer at the expense of less wealthy taxpayers — Italian, in the most recent case, or American, in other cases. Of more concern is that, as president, Romney would further expand the advantages of fellow rich people.

Romney encouraged that worry on Tuesday, when he announced at a campaign stop that he would be tough on welfare — “we will end the culture of dependency and restore a culture of good hard work” — and then went to a pair of fundraisers where high-rolling donors paid as much as $75,000 for access to him.

“The question is not whether he did well, or whether he did it legally, but whether he did it with any sense of ethics.”

Does that one pithy sentence just not sum it the fuck up?