I often refer to Team O and Team Romney when discussing the campaigns, as it makes for an easy shorthand that everyone can understand.  Little did I know that it also made sense as a kind of Twilight reference.  While Team O accused Mitt Romney of being a vampire capitalist because of his work at Bain Capital, one of Barack Obama’s national co-chairs also turns out to be a vampire capitalist as well — at least by Obama’s definition:

One of President Barack Obama’s top campaign spokesmen is a private equity manager whose firm has shut down several factories and laid off hundreds of people amid a stalled economy.

Federico Pena’s role at Vestar Capital Partners has emerged as Obama’s aides and deputies continue their effort to portray former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney‘s investment career as ruthless, job-destroying, profit-maximizing “vulture capitalism.” Pena has been a partner at Vestar since 2000.

Pena is a former mayor of Denver in swing-state Colorado, a former cabinet member for President Bill Clinton and one of 35 “national co-chairs “ of the president’s 2012 campaign.

The news will likely further undermine the Obama campaign’s effort to focus on Romney’s business practices, rather than Obama’s White House policies, and the resulting debt, deficits and unemployment.

Say, the Obama campaign does remind me a little of the Twilight series.  I hear a whole lot of emphasis on just how dreamy Obama is, along with a whole lot of whiny angst about how the rest of the world isn’t brilliant enough to understand him.  Toss in a tiresome teenage-crush angle, and I think we have a movie series.

While Obama drinks up Pena’s vampiric blood, er, private-capital donations, he’s still trying to demonize profit, as Politico reports.  Instead, I think he’s explaining why the Obama administration can’t grasp job creation:

The president maintained that the private equity industry is a welcome part of the economy – risk-takers and investors should be rewarded, he said. But their motives are not job creation.

“The people who work in these firms will tell you that’s not their goal,” Obama said, explaining that the goal for private equity companies, such as Bain, the company Romney co-founded, is “maximizing short-term gains for your investors.”

“There may be value for that type of experience but it’s not in the White House,” the president said, where the goal is “strong and sustainable, broad-based growth.”

That’s obviously been true for the past three and a half years.  How has that worked out for us?  Here’s a chart of the civilian population participation in the workforce:

This shows that more and more people have lost work but are no longer counted among the workforce — millions who have entered into a Twilight world of their own, where they’re neither workers nor retirees.  They just have simply … ceased to exist to this administration.

By golly, they’re not vampires — they’re zombies.

Update: Here’s the best part — Obama will keep the money he’s received from … Bain Capital:

Though the Obama campaign has repeatedly attacked Mitt Romney for his career at Bain Capital, President Obama still accepted $7,500 in campaign contributions from three Bain executives. His campaign press secretary, Ben LaBolt told The Politicker the president has no intention of giving the money back.