TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

The Obama campaign put out an attack ad on Romney, which accuses Bain Capital of running GST Steel into the ground to profit from it. Avik Roy explained in January why this, um, isn’t exactly accurate:

Romney and Bain Capital have come under fire from Newt Gingrich for “looting” GS Industries. According to Gingrich, Bain enriched itself and its investors by drawing dividends and fees out of the company, directly causing its collapse. But this isn’t exactly right. According to Reuters, Bain earned $12 million in dividends and $4.5 million in consulting fees from its investment in GS: a tidy sum, but one that amounts to only 4 percent of GS’s 1995 debt load. Furthermore, the Reuters report doesn’t appear to account for Bain’s loss of its sizeable (but unknown) equity investment in GS.

Did Bain make mistakes in the way it tried to run GS? Sure — hindsight, after all, is 20/20. The firm overestimated the attractiveness of the U.S. steel industry, and overestimated its abilities to persuade GS’s workers to reduce their wages and benefits to competitive levels. But it’s factually wrong, and indeed dishonest, to claim that Bain “looted” GS, that Bain sucked the blood out of GS in order to enrich itself. Bain stood to make far more money, and generate far greater returns for its investors, if GS had regained its past prosperity.

The Obama campaign’s ad pretends that Bain Capital purchased the company and screwed it up—when in fact the company was suffering from foreign competition, just as the rest of the steel industry was. But hey—whenever you can get someone who lost their job to accuse your competitor of being a vampire, you’ve got to turn that into an ad, right?