Romney Camp Admits That Its Bain Job Creation Number Is Bogus
Mitt Romney, last night’s Iowa caucus winner, has been on the campaign trail claiming that the private equity firm he ran, known as Bain Capital, was responsible for creating loads of jobs. Romney responded to criticism about his time at Bain by saying, “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.”
When a group of Romney backers ran an ad making the same claim, they were unable to back up the number with data. And as it turns out, the Romney camp can’t either, as it admitted that the statistic is nothing but cherry-picked job growth from a few companies that did well after they were bought by Bain:
[Romney spokesman Eric] Fehrnstrom says the 100,000 figure stems from the growth in jobs from three companies that Romney helped to start or grow while at Bain Capital: Staples (a gain of 89,000 jobs), The Sports Authority (15,000 jobs), and Domino’s (7,900 jobs).
This tally obviously does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved — and are based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain. (Indeed, Romney made his comments in response to a former employee of American Pad & Paper Co. who says he lost his job after Bain Capital took it private.)
Bain Capital has been responsible for thousands of layoffs at companies it bankrupted, such as American Pad & Paper, Dade International, and LIVE Entertainment, which Romney’s stat completely leaves out. He’s also taking credit for jobs created long after he left the firm to launch his political career. To sum it up, the stat Romney uses is incredibly dishonest, like much of his jobs rhetoric.
One of Romney’s Bain business partners has said that he “never thought of what I do for a living as job creation.” “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors,” he added. And Bain has certainly done that, maximizing earnings “by firing workers, seeking government subsidies, and flipping companies quickly for large profits.” Due to a lucrative retirement deal, Romney is still making millions from Bain, as he goes across the country calling himself “middle class” and joking about being “unemployed.”
By: Pat Garofalo, Think Progress, January 4, 2012
Mitt Romney’s “Not-A-Mandate” Iowa Victory
Mitt Romney and his backers decided that to win in Iowa they had to destroy Newt Gingrich’s campaign. Now Gingrich looks eager — and able — to return the favor.
Romney got his victory, but it doesn’t feel much like one. It’s embarrassing that the supposed Republican front-runner managed to beat Rick Santorum by only eight votes out of about 120,000 cast in Tuesday’s caucuses. It’s troubling that Romney has spent the past five years campaigning in Iowa and still could draw just one-quarter of the vote.
And it’s downright ominous that Gingrich is threatening to do whatever he can to block Romney’s path to the nomination. If the sneering description of Romney in Gingrich’s post-caucus speech Tuesday is a preview — he called him a “Massachusetts moderate” who is “pretty good at managing the decay” — this could get ugly.
I mean uglier. Sometimes it seems as if niceness is Iowa’s state religion, but the way Romney and his crew took Gingrich apart was vicious. A pro-Romney political action committee, Restore Our Future, spent more than $4 million ensuring that Iowans couldn’t watch 10 minutes of television without being assaulted by an ad explaining why Gingrich was a scoundrel, a knave, a hack, a goon or — shudder — a closet liberal.
Romney could claim distance from this sordid barrage since Restore Our Future is “independent,” wink wink, of the campaign. There was a certain poetic justice, since Gingrich has done as much as any individual to make U.S. political rhetoric a blood sport. Could it be that the man who calls Barack Obama a “food-stamp president” can’t take a little heat?
But Gingrich is furious — perhaps not just because he believes that the negative advertising was unfair but because he knows that it was brutally effective. He had surged ahead of Romney and seemed to have a viable path to the nomination. Tuesday night, after being worked over, Gingrich won just 13 percent of the vote and finished fourth.
It’s doubtful Gingrich can become the nominee. But he can inflict as much damage as possible on Romney, especially in this weekend’s two New Hampshire debates.
Gingrich is smart enough to know that the effect will be to give Santorum the time and space he needs to begin building a campaign organization that can compete with Romney’s. This de facto anti-Romney alliance, if it materializes, will be one of convenience, not conviction. But it could be effective.
The Iowa campaign proved what pollsters have been telling us all along: Republicans just don’t like Mitt Romney very much.
Oh, they like him much better than they like Obama. But this past week in Iowa, while it was easy to find support for Romney, it was hard to find passion. Crowds didn’t swoon over Romney the way they did over Ron Paul or Michele Bachmann. Many of the staunch conservatives who dominate Republican politics here simply do not believe that Romney is one of their own.
“I would never vote for Mitt Romney, even if he were the nominee,” said Phil Grove, whom I met Monday afternoon at a Bachmann rally in West Des Moines.
Grove, a chemist, and his wife Sue, a nurse, were still undecided — the caucuses were just a day away — and had reasons for rejecting each candidate. Santorum and Gingrich were creatures of Washington, they said; Bachmann and Paul had good ideas but probably couldn’t beat Obama. Romney, though, was seen by the couple as simply beyond the pale.
Romney’s good fortune is that true-believer conservatives have had multiple candidates from which to choose — until now. With Bachmann dropping out and Rick Perry staggering, the race becomes — from Romney’s point of view — disturbingly simple.
He comes out of Iowa with a win, in the technical sense, but also with a new chief rival who has the potential to do fairly well in New Hampshire and very well in South Carolina. Given the shrinking field, there will be room for Santorum’s support to grow if he campaigns effectively.
Romney, meanwhile, still hasn’t proved that he can break through that 25 percent ceiling he keeps bumping against. And he has to deal with a Newt Gingrich who is wounded, angry and able to make himself the center of attention — the political equivalent of a snarling wolverine.
Yes, a funny thing happened on the way to the coronation.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 4, 2012
Can Mitt Romney Ever Flip Back Again?
The deflating open secret of the Iowa caucuses is that they don’t matter. Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination by default. He was, and remains, wildly vulnerable to a conservative challenger. But the challenger needed to clear a modest threshold: having a national organization, enough money to engage in advertising wars, and the ability to recite standard party dogma in the form of complete sentences. Rick Perry had the first two but fell woefully short of the third. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum could pass the third but not the first two.
Remarkably, the many Republicans who could have beaten Romney all decided not to enter the race or, in the case of Tim Pawlenty, dropped out prematurely. The challengers to Romney devoted all their energies to attacking each other – not a single attack ad against Romney even aired in Iowa. None of his many, enormous vulnerabilities has been exploited. The profusely bleeding, one-armed man managed to swim through shark-infested waters because most of the sharks drowned or decided either to eat each other instead of him.
But what kind of president would Romney be?
George Packer, in a terrific column about the casual acceptance of hysterical charges in the GOP, argues that Romney has crossed a threshold of wingnuttery from which he can never return:
It would be a mistake, though, to believe that, long after Iowa, once the horse race is over, and if he’s elected, Romney could suddenly flip a switch, clear the air of the toxicity left behind by the Republican field, and return to being a cautious centrist whose most reassuring quality is his lack of principles. His party wouldn’t let him; and, after all, how a candidate runs shapes how a President governs. In politics, once a sellout, always a sellout; once a thug, always a thug.
I agree with Packer’s conclusion but not his reasoning. There is actually a pretty close analogue to Romney: George H.W. Bush. The scion of a moderate, Establishment Republican, Bush abandoned his views on abortion and supply-side economics in order to curry favor with a party moving right, and was elected president by running a dishonest and viciously demagogic campaign. Once in office, Bush fulfilled the fears of his conservative critics by governing as a real moderate. The campaign did not shape the presidency.
The difference is that Bush faced a Democratic Congress. If faced with similar circumstances, we would probably see the old Massachusetts Romney reemerge. But, if elected, he is far more likely to enjoy a Republican Congress. An interesting theme in the conservative commentary today is that Republicans, while not thrilled about Romney, truly seem to believe that he will serve as a faithful vessel for the Party’s agenda. Here is Republican member of Congress Tom Cole:
“The real division in the GOP these days is not between moderates and conservatives. It is between pragmatists and ideologues. That same division plays itself out almost every day in the House and Senate GOP Conferences,” Cole continued. “The next GOP president will be forced to govern as a conservative to maintain the support of the GOP rank and file and its caucuses in both the House and Senate. Anyone who thinks we are going to nominate an Eisenhower, Nixon or Ford is out of touch with the GOP electorate. And any GOP politician who believes he can govern from the White House as anything other than a conservative is delusional.”
This is almost surely correct. A President Romney would have little leeway to push a GOP Congress to the center, and he has pledged himself to fulfill the agenda that the Party has already determined. Former Bush administration Minister of Propaganda Pete Wehner echoes, “This year, it seems to me, the party is the sun and the candidates are the planets … They are trying to prove to primary voters that they are reliable and trustworthy when it comes to the basic platform of the GOP.”
It is surely clear that Romney’s apparent victory was obtained by erasing every last vestige of his old and (I believe, though I can’t be sure) authentic self. At this moment hardly anybody believes that his conversion was actually authentic. The support for him, such as it is, is simply a combination of disqualifying rivals and the assumption that the Party will continue to own him in office.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, January 3, 2012
Newt Gingrich Calls Mitt Romney A Liar
Newt Gingrich is done with being the cuddly guy who just loves animals and blubbers openly at the mere mention of his mom. Nope, he’s taking off the gloves, no longer afraid to openly display his withering opinion of his political rivals and journalists. Oh, wait, actually, that last bit’s not new at all.
But what is new is his willingness to go negative on Mitt Romney: Until very lately, Gingrich mostly ran a non-negative campaign, at least officially. Like the natural-born neurotic he is, Newt even displayed some agita about his own positivity, publicly mulling over his failures. “I probably should have responded faster and more aggressively,” he said at a press conference this weekend, going so far as to compare himself to the swift-boated John Kerry himself.
And so this morning on the Early Show, rather than continue to criticize himself, Gingrich went into full attack mode when Norah O’Donnell asked him to clarify comments he’d made about Romney’s own negative ads (“Somebody who’ll lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when they are president.”)
“Are you calling him a liar?” she asked, in tones of high drama. “Yes,” he said with an actual shrug, seeming bored to be asked. She asked again, so he clarified with an extra dollop of condescension: “Well, you seem shocked by it! Which part of what I just said to you is false?” Instead of coming back with the obvious (It’s not what you said that’s false, but the tan with which you said it, Mr. Gingrich!), O’Donnell kept grilling him. An utterly nonplussed Gingrich said he would have no problem voting for the horrible, terrible liar Mitt Romney for president if he gets the nomination, leading Bob Schieffer to snicker eagerly like he had just heard his first Santorum-Google joke.
In about six months, the Romney campaign will be using this Gingrich endorsement in an ad..”Newt Gingrich’s Gamble”: http://videos.nymag.com/decor/live/transparent.gif
By: Noreen Malone, Daily Intel, January 3, 2012
Iowa’s $200-Per-Vote Caucuses Reward Negatives, Nastiness, Narrow Thinking
The Republicans who would be president, the super PACs and the surrogates had already spent more than $12 millionon television ads—almost half of them negative—before the final weekend leading up to Tuesday’s Iowa caucuses.
That doesn’t count the thousands of radio ads, mailings, lighted billboards in Des Moines and costs for staff.
Add it all up and there is a good chance that, when all is said and done Tuesday night, the candidates will have spent $200 a vote to influence the roughly 110,000 Iowans who are expected to participate in the GOP caucuses.
And the really unsettling thing is that the caucuses are just for show.
While the results may so damage some candidates that their runs for the presidency will be finished, they will not actually produce any delegates to the Republican National Convention.
That’s because, as the Des Moines Register notes, “Iowa delegates are not bound to vote for a specific candidate at the national convention, and no percentage of delegates is given to any one candidate (on caucus night).” Iowa Republican Party Executive Director Chad Olsen told the paper that the GOP caucus acts more as a “temperature gauge” of how Iowans feel about the candidates, and convention delegates use the results to inform their decision.
Seriously? All this for an glorified straw poll?
That’s the problem with the caucus system, which operates on an only slightly better model on the Democratic side.
Huge amounts of money are spent to influence a very small percentage of the electorate—less than 20 percent of Iowans who are likely to vote Republican in November will participate in Tuesday’s caucuses, and most of them will leave after the balloting finishes. An even smaller number of Iowans will begin the process of choosing representatives to county conventions, who in turn elect delegates to district and state conventions at which Iowa’s national delegates are actually selected.
Ultimately, party insiders are all but certain to form the delegation and choose how to vote at the national convention.
I don’t begrudge Iowa a place at the start of the calendar. In fact, I prefer that Midwesterners start things. But the caucuses are not the right way to begin.
The progressive movement of a century ago fought for open primaries, where all voters could easily participate and where the power of political bosses—and, ideally, outside money—could be overwhelmed by popular democracy.
There are good arguments to be made that primaries no longer hold out such promise, and I am not suggesting that open primaries will in and of themselves cure all that ails our politics. But the Iowa campaign of 2012 confirms that the caucuses are more prone to being warped by money and by rules that favor party bosses.
Iowa maintains a caucus system not because it is the best way to choose a nominee but because its first-in-the-nation status depends on a longstanding arrangement with New Hampshire, which claims the right to hold the first primary. Under the deal, Iowa can go first, so long as it does not hold a primary. Unfortunately, that means Iowa must hold caucuses. And the caucuses are a dysfunctional way to begin the process.
The parties have lacked the courage to demand a reform of this arrangement. But they should do so before the 2016 race begins because the presidential nominating process should not be defined by caucuses—in Iowa or anywhere else.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, January 1, 2012
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