This week saw the first time that the remainders of the Seven Dwarfs have really gone at frontrunner Mitt Romney. All of the Republicans are breaking Ronald Regan’s 11th Commandment, and are speaking serious ill of their GOP rivals, but this week saw the really big guns rolled out against the job cremator and former governor of Massachusetts.
The main line of attack has been the one that the Obama Campaign had intended to use, namely Romney’s vulture capital record at Bain. They have hammered him on the work sent overseas, on the companies that were bankrupted for a profit and the general fact that the business model at Bain was not to build up companies but to break them up.
This is a good attack on the one term governor and nearly perennial candidate, for the reason that it is basically true. There is nothing illegal about what his private equity firm did and does, but there definitely something distasteful, especially in a nation with more than 15 million unemployed or under-employed people.
The question is, are the attacks from Gingrich and Perry and Santorum (soon to be known as the former candidates ) helping him by inoculating him on this issue?
There is a very disingenuous (are there any other kinds?) in the Wall St. Journal this morning making that claim. James Taranto compares Romney’s situation to that of John Kerry in 2004. He makes the point that since no one challenged Sen. Kerry on his military service in the primary season he was not ready to defend against it in the general election.
Of course the place where this analogy breaks down is that the Swift Boat Veterans were lying. They were bankrolled by conservatives who would say anything to prevent their president from being unceremoniously tossed out after one term, just like his father.
Still, there is a chance that there is a grain of truth in this column (I am as shocked to write that as you are to read it!), in that the attacks coming now will give Romney a chance to practice against the meme.
We’ve seen a preview of what they will use, with the claims that free enterprise is being put on trial and the claim that Mitt created 100,000 jobs. Let’s take a look at both those claims, starting with the second.
The 100K jobs claim has been evolving, which is never a good sign of the truth. First it was just a flat statement. Then the campaign said that it based on all jobs created since Mitt was at Bain and since. Now the candidate is claiming that it is a net of jobs created.
The problem with all of this is that at no point has the Romney campaign nor Bain Capital given access to the numbers they use for their calculations. That is a really bad sign.
This is a problem that is not going to go away for the GOP frontrunner. There is an eternity between now and election day and this is a claim that will be investigated and probably debunked over and over and over. Already the Washington Post fact checker has weighed in on this issue:
Romney never could have raised money from investors if the prospectus seeking $1-million investments from the super wealthy had said it would focus on creating jobs. Instead, it said: “The objective of the fund is to achieve an annual rate of return on invested capital in excess of the returns generated by conventional investments in the public equity market and the private equity market.”
Indeed, the prospectus never mentions “jobs,” “job,” or “employees.”
Second, it has become increasingly hard to understand how Romney’s personal involvement played a role in creating these jobs, especially years later. He clearly is adding up all the jobs now at the companies that are thriving, arguing these numbers far outweigh the job losses at companies that failed. But as the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, the failure rate one can attribute to Bain Capital changes significantly if one counts five years from an investment or eight years from an investment.
Even though this claim only gets a single Pinocchio (out of four possible) it is pretty damning. Expect to see a lot more of this.
The danger for Romney is that he is already getting a reputation for bald-faced lying. This preposterous claim will only serve to re-enforce the ideas that he can not be trusted to tell the truth, even by the low standards we accept from our politicians. That could be a killer in a general election.
Then there is the meme of “putting free enterprise on trial”. This might sound like a good sound bite to the hard core business base of the Republican Party, but the fact is that in a market economy ever idea is always on trial. That is a feature not a bug.
That the Romney campaign thinks in an age of Occupy movements and massive distrust and even contempt for Wall St and large corporations that this is going to be a winner shows just how out of touch the campaign is.
We are in the midst of waking up to realize that we have ceded too much of control to corporations, that we have allowed them to grow too large and powerful for the good of our nation and our democracy. Free enterprise is indeed on trial, and it should be.
The problem with the message that Mitt is selling is that while everyone would like to be filthy rich, the 99% are beginning to realize that there is no way the 1% are going to even let them in the game, let alone on a level playing field.
Romney is going to talk a lot about envy, but that misses the point. Most folks don’t care that there are ultra-wealthy, they just care that the ultra-wealthy are using that wealth and power to siphon even more money from the rest of us.
The actions of Bain Capital are easy to understand, and they are a good template to compare to the other companies that Americans have come to loathe, the banks, the insurance companies, the other vulture capitalists.
If the choice is President Obama who is making the populist pitch and Mitt Romney who is making the pitch to return things to the bad old days of the Bush administration (which he is with promises to roll back the ACA, Dodd-Frank, and privatize Social Security) I think that all primary vaccine in the world is not going to help.
The floor is yours.