Source.

Pro-Obama “Super PAC” Priorities USA Action recycles former Ampad employee Loris Huffman to deliver its message, “Mitt Romney and Bain Capital drove a profitable company into bankruptcy. They made more than $100 million profit. . . . If Mitt Romney wins, the middle class loses.”

But, as always, there’s more to the story, which follows the ad:

In fact, this April 2002 Boston Globe headline pretty much sums things up: “Plant workers may resurface. Threaten to carry over grudge from ’94 campaign.”

The striking Indiana paper plant workers who helped sink Mitt Romney’s 1994 Senate run are warning they may now haunt his campaign for governor. [...]

Workers blamed Romney for shutting down the Ampad plant in Marion, Ind., three months after he lost to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), eliminating some 200 jobs and sowing misery for hundreds of families. [...]

Jerry Rayburn, 33, who lost his $10-per-hour job as an assembly-line paper gluer, said, “He destroyed a lot of people’s lives here,” said “It was horrible.”

Many employees had worked at the plant for decades in low-paying unskilled or semi-skilled jobs.

“People really suffered here,” said Loris Huffman, 66, a tab operator who said she lost $200 a month in lost Social Security benefits due to the closing. “They took away everything. It was really sad.”

This 2002 article provides several important details. In July 1994, Bain Capital bought an 80 percent interest in Ampad and reorganized the plant. Subsequently, International Paper Workers Union members went on strike at the Indiana plant and were still on strike in October, when some of the strikers went to Massachusetts to ask Romney — still on the campaign trail — for his help. The plant closed February 15, 1995. Union officials blamed Romney because, after losing the November 8, 1994 election to Kennedy, Romney was back at Bain Capital when the plant actually closed.

However, Andrew Miga reported at the Globe: “Romney took a leave of absence from his Bain CEO post in January 1994 to run for Senate. Bain attorneys told him he could play no role settling the strike.”

Additionally, as blogger Tina Hemond discovered, after examining the Indianapolis Star 1979 through 1995, articles reported on the United Paperworkers “going out on strike, refusing to accept compromises, and finally, that employees were hired back….”

The Globe article claimed Bain engaged in “slashing wages, cutting benefits and sparking a bitter strike. Workers were fired and forced to re-apply for their old jobs at less money.”

As for Loris Huffman, was she rehired? We are not told. She states in the political ad above that she was 60 when she lost her job at Ampad. In 2002, Loris’s complaint was that she had “lost $200 a month in lost Social Security benefits due to the closing.” Now, 17 years after the Ampad plant closed — at age 77 — Loris surfaces to re-air her grievance with Romney.

Why isn’t Loris’s complaint with the union, which ultimately forced the closure in February 1995?

As for the political ad, wasn’t Randy Johnson, a former Ampad worker and vice president of union Local 154, available?

Oh, wait, he was — and speaking out on behalf of the Obama campaign. Shira Schoenberg, political correspondent at MassLive.com, wrote Monday:

Randy Johnson, a union worker at Ampad, spoke to reporters about Romney during the primary campaign. Johnson will be speaking to reporters again Monday on a conference call organized by the Obama campaign.

According to a release announcing the call, the Obama campaign will argue that “Romney’s business values put short term profit for himself and his investors ahead of long term growth for the companies he bought and sold – destroying some of the communities where he and his partners invested.”

Note that Johnson (whom Hemond observed was a political operative) is identified as a “union worker” at Ampad, not as a United Paperworkers local union official.

Read the rest of the very thorough research Hemond pulled from contemporary newspaper files (which Romney’s primary opponents failed to read, apparently; and don’t expect the Lamestream Media to bother).