By SARA MURRAY

Mitt Romney reiterated this week his belief that government shouldn’t be “picking winners” in the private sector, and his campaign is pounding away at the argument that the Obama administration did exactly that in its failed investment in the Solyndra solar panel company.

But as the Solyndra debate rolls on, that line of attack is being shadowed by a vestige of Mr. Romney’s own history: his championing of green-energy investments, some of which also went belly up, while he was governor of Massachusetts.

Boston HeraldAs Massachusetts governor in 2003, Mitt Romney, above at right, spoke to leaders of Konarka Technologies.

The $15 million Mr. Romney set aside for the Massachusetts Green Energy Fund when he was governor was a fraction of the $535 million in loan guarantees the Department of Energy gave Solyndra before it went bankrupt, part of an overall $16 billion fund. Still, the campaign of President Barack Obama is now citing the Massachusetts fund in an attempt to undercut the Romney argument that the administration has wrongly meddled in the private sector. The Democratic message is simple: The Republican contender did pretty much the same thing.

The green-energy tiff is an example of a broader trend emerging. The Romney campaign is seeking to keep the spotlight on the Obama presidential record. Meantime the Obama campaign is trying to use Mr. Romney’s own record as a public official to show that on a series of issues—job creation, government debt, abortion rights and global warming—his gubernatorial performance is at odds with his campaign posture.

Solyndra still lurks as an uncomfortable problem for the Obama campaign. The company was in the news this week as it tried, for the second time, to sell off its California manufacturing complex to help repay creditors and the federal government.

But Democrats are pointing to the Massachusetts fund to spur alternative-energy companies. Mr. Romney inherited that fund—much as Mr. Obama inherited the U.S. program that gave loans to Solyndra—so the debate turns on what he did with it once in office. Such funds are commonplace in many states, used to attract new businesses or build up local enterprises.

Early in his term, Mr. Romney appeared at Konarka Technologies Inc., which had won approval for $1.5 million in first-round public funding shortly before Mr. Romney took office. He handed over the funds to Konarka, a solar panel maker, and used that appearance to announce the start of his own $15 million Green Energy Fund.

The $160 million fund that predated Mr. Romney was managed by a semipublic agency involving officials in government, business and academe. Mr. Romney carved out $15 million from that fund and shifted it to a public-private partnership run by a board of independent, private-sector investors.

The Romney clean-energy fund went on to make 14 investments in green-energy concerns. Three of those have gone under, said William Osborn, a founding partner of the Massachusetts Green Energy Fund. He added that the governor never raised concerns about the program. “There were plenty of opportunities for him to say, ‘This is a bad thing for government to do,’ ” said Mr. Osborn, a Democrat. “None of that happened.”

The Romney campaign says the key difference between Mr. Romney’s effort and the Obama administration’s approach is that Mr. Romney converted his program into a public-private partnership. “Mitt took the money away from the government bureaucrats and gave it to private venture capitalists to manage,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior adviser to the campaign. “That’s where it belongs.”

Mr. Romney took heat about his energy policies during the GOP primaries, when opponents tried to paint him as too liberal. And Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum accused him of “listening to the radical environmentalists about global warming and pushing taxpayer dollars to green energy companies.”the Obama campaign contends his green energy financing clashes with his campaign rhetoric. “The wheels continue to fall off Mitt Romney’s Solyndra offensive against President Obama,” said Lis Smith, an Obama campaign spokeswoman.

The debate over the Massachusetts fund was pushed further into the limelight, to the discomfort of the Romney campaign, with the Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing early this month by Konarka, the firm to which Mr. Romney delivered the state funds early in his administration. The company said in a news release that its assets will be liquidated.

Still, Mr. Romney’s campaign says that the candidate has been consistent in his views about state backing for green businesses. It pointed to a 2003 interview in which the candidate said, “The idea of state employees deciding which businesses to invest in is not a model which I would subscribe to.”

As governor, Mr. Romney felt money devoted to green energy would be better spent elsewhere, aides said. At one point, facing a budget shortfall, Mr. Romney used millions from the $160 million energy fund to help plug a budget hole. His campaign cited that as evidence that he attempted to steer state funds away from green investments.

The philosophy was: “We don’t believe this stuff works, so let’s try and raid it,” said Jim Stergios, who was an undersecretary for environmental policy in the Romney administration.