Steelworker Featured at DNC Didn't Work for Bain

File this one under “ooops”:

The Democratic National Convention on Wednesday featured three speakers billed as “former employees of companies controlled by Bain Capital.”

They each told compelling stories about jobs lost, allegedly because of the actions of Bain under Romney’s leadership.

But it turns out one of those employees never actually worked for a company controlled by Bain Capital.

David Foster was supposedly one of those former employees on the convention schedule. He told the story about 750 steelworkers who lost their jobs when the Bain-controlled company GST steel filed for bankruptcy in the early 1990s.

“In 2001, with GST bankrupt and Romney still CEO of Bain, I stood in front of hundreds of steelworkers in their 50s and 60s, and retirees in their 70s and 80s, and told them Romney and Bain had broken their promises. Jobs, vacation pay, severance, health insurance and pension benefits that were promised — they were all gone,” he said. Read his full speech here

But Foster, according to a former spokesman for GST Steel, never actually worked for the company.

“David Foster was never an employee of GST Steel’s Kansas City plant. He was employed by the United Steelworkers of America as their regional union director to represent GST Steel, but was not employed at our facility,” according to BC Huselton, who was head of HR at GST.

Instead, Foster was a union organizer, who negotiated for workers that did work for the company.

Unfortunately, Republicans can’t crow about this too loudly:

Republicans are out with a new web video today highlighting their messaging push during the Democratic convention that President Barack Obama is a disappointment, but maybe they could have found a more effective messenger.

The video features a woman breaking up with a cardboard cut-out of Obama, with lines line “You think I didn’t see you with Sarah Jessica Parker and George Clooney?” and “It’s not me, it’s you.”

But the woman in the video expressing frustration with the president is none other than RNC Director of Hispanic Outreach Bettina Inclan. If Inclan voted for Obama in 2008 she did so privately while publicly supporting Republicans, as Rep. Thad McCotter’s communications director and then a regional Victory director for John McCain’s campaign.

Inclan made waves in May when she declared on an RNC conference call regarding Romney that “As a candidate, to my understanding, he’s still deciding what his position on immigration is.” RNC spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski quickly walked the comments back, saying “We never said the governor is still deciding on immigration — I want to make sure we are exponentially clear.”

One Democratic staffer piled on:

“It’s a sad state of affairs over at the RNC,” the staffer said. “They couldn’t find anyone to say anything nice about Mitt Romney at their convention and now they can’t find anyone but an RNC staffer to star in their anti-President Obama web video during the Democratic convention. It might be time for them to have “the talk” with Mitt Romney.”

Don’t these people know there are ways to check these things?