Why The Bain Capital Controversy Is So Damaging To GOP Chances This Fall
The last few weeks of the Republican Presidential road show has been dominated by discussion of Mitt Romney’s career as head of a Wall Street private equity firm — Bain Capital. Most people who enter politics have some previous career in the private sector — especially if they’re wealthy.
But Mitt Romney’s career on Wall Street — which he apparently hoped would allow him to tout his credentials as a “job creator” — will instead weigh down his election hopes like a massive millstone. There are six reasons why:
1). First and most important, attacks on Romney’s history at Bain are not “attacks on free enterprise” — or being “anti-business.” They are important for what they communicate about Mitt Romney and his values and the contrast that it poses with President Obama.
Barack Obama – like Mitt Romney — earned a degree at Harvard — and all of the opportunities that afforded. But when he graduated from law school, Obama went to work helping workers in the shadow of closed -down steel mills. Romney made millions for himself closing down steel mills.
The point is not just that workers were laid off, or jobs were outsourced — though they were. The point is not whether some of the ventures Romney funded succeeded and others failed. The point is that the impact of Romney’s business activity on the lives of ordinary people was incidental to his one and only goal: making huge sums of money for himself and a small group of his partners and investors.
Romney’s idea of success was embodied in that picture from two decades ago, with Romney at the center, surrounded by a squadron of Wall Street sharpies with money coming out of their pockets, their mouths and ears.
The point of the Bain story is that Romney would do whatever he could legally do to make money for himself and his crew. The effect of his decisions on the lives of ordinary people — or even the businesses in which they invested — was simply irrelevant. If shifting jobs overseas would make him and his friends more money – fine. If Bain could make millions by loading up a business with debt and bleeding it of cash — that was fine too — even if it meant that the business itself was ultimately forced to close. If buying a business and chopping it up into parts for resale would make him more money — so be it.
Improving the lives of ordinary workers — or of local communities — was never his goal. His goal was to make millions and millions of dollars for himself — often at other people’s expense. Instead of viewing ordinary workers as human beings who were parts of a team, he viewed them as “factors of production” — assets to be used when they helped him make money — objects to be discarded when that would fatten his bottom line.
Americans want a President who understands and cares about ordinary people — that’s not the Mitt Romney of Bain Capital.
2). If you were the Republican Party, you couldn’t pick a worse time to nominate a candidate with a resume as one of Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe.”
Even today, most voters are acutely aware that the recklessness of the big Wall Street Banks — and a complicit Bush Administration — caused the 2008 financial crisis that cost eight million Americans their jobs and worst economic calamity since the Great Depression.
The GOP will have to go some distance to convince everyday voters that they should trust their economic futures to a guy who was part of precisely the same crowd whose greed and recklessness just sent the economy crashing in flames.
After all, not many people would be keen to sign up for a cruise managed by the same team that commanded the Titanic.
3). Over the last year, Americans have become increasingly focused on economic inequality — and on the fact that the gang that caused the economy to collapse kept making billions while everyone else paid the price.
The message of the Occupy Movement doesn’t resonate solely on the left of the political spectrum. Occupy speaks to many independents and conservatives as well.
And let’s remember, the Occupy Movement started out as “Occupy Wall Street.” Americans are increasingly uncomfortable with the exploding role of the financial sector in the American economy. They are not uncomfortable because of theoretical or “policy” concerns. It just doesn’t make sense to them that a relatively tiny number of people — who don’t build a product or create a service — can make massive amounts of money, while ordinary people who work hard and play by the rules see their incomes flat-line.
Their view is simple. They create cars, or food, or houses or computers — or they provide police protection, or care for sick people, or teach our kids. Why should they be asked to sacrifice when guys who basically gamble for a living — as Wall Street speculators — make incomprehensibly large sums of money?
It makes no sense to them that 400 families control as much wealth as 150 million of their fellow Americans — that the top 1% control 30% of all of the wealth in America.
It makes no sense that a hedge fund investor like John Paulson can make $5 billion in income and pay a lower percentage in taxes than a secretary. He makes $2.4 million per hour — or $40,000 a second. Paulson makes as much in the first 1.25 minutes of the work year as the average worker makes all year long.
That kind of excessive wealth might not upset everyday Americans so much if their own incomes were growing. But those incomes have stagnated for decades. And over those same decades, the incomes of the top 1% have increased by almost 300%.
And perhaps most galling to everyday voters, is the fact that the wealthiest Americans have such an outsized influence setting the rules — cutting their own taxes — making their own regulations — and are rarely held accountable for the recklessness that has cost everyone else so dearly.
Americans feel that the middle class is in dire jeopardy — that it is under attack. They worry that the American dream will be snatched from their own families — and those of their children.
Not a great time for the Republicans to nominate a poster boy for the one percent.
4). The impact of Romney’s record at Bain is magnified by his own personality.
Romney comes across as a cold, calculating guy — precisely the kind of guy who doesn’t blink an eye when he orders up hundreds of “pink slips.” He is about as empathetic as a rock.
He has a hard time connecting with people in public — and on TV. And he seems to have a tin ear — a hard time understanding how his remarks will be interpreted by ordinary voters.
He “enjoys” firing people who don’t give him good service. Really?
He doesn’t understand how it might sound for a guy who has a fortune of $200 million to say that he is actually “unemployed” too. Or when — having graduated from Harvard, born into a family of the CEO of a big auto company, he says he has been worried about getting a “pink slip”? Sure.
He doesn’t even have to stop and think when he offers to bet $10,000 on who is right in a televised debate? Ten thousand dollars is two thirds of the average annual Social Security benefit.
That kind of tin ear sends a message to ordinary voters that he is simply out of touch – that he doesn’t understand or empathize with the lives of ordinary Americans.
Then there is the story of the 12-hour trip with the dog in the kennel on top of the car. The story about how when the dog got sick riding on top of the car — had an attack of diarrhea. Romney hosed down the car — hosed down the dog — put the dog back on top of the car and continued the drive.
These personal characteristics just reinforce the picture of Romney as a Wall Street baron who doesn’t understand or care about the needs, or lives, or interests of ordinary Americans.
5). The fact that Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry have joined in defining Romney’s Bain years absolutely inoculates Democrats from charges that they are “anti-free enterprise” or “anti-business” when they make the same charges.
Probably not very likely that Gingrich or Perry would volunteer to attack Romney’s history at Bain next September — but they just did. All Democrats need to do is put a clip of Rick Perry in an ad where he accused Romney of being a “vulture capitalist.”.
6). Finally, in so many respects, Romney’s Bain history makes him the perfect antagonist in the campaign narrative set out by President Obama last month in his Kansas speech.
The President will, quite correctly, frame the upcoming election as a battle for the future of the American middle class — a choice between a society where we’re all in this together or all in this alone.
He will offer a vision of America where we look out for each other — where everyone is called upon to play by the same rules — and everyone gets a fair shot, a fair shake and contributes their fair share.
The Willard Mitt Romney who ran Bain Capital is the perfect foil for the Democratic narrative this fall. That’s why the Bain Capital narrative is so important for defining Romney and setting the terms of this year’s election campaign.
Just visualize the national political debate that features the Mitt Romney we’ve seen on TV the last several weeks and the Barack Obama who made the speech in Osawatomie, Kansas last month.
At the close of his Kansas speech — which took place in the same town where Theodore Roosevelt had announced his “New Nationalism” a century ago. Obama said:
“We are all Americans,” Teddy Roosevelt told them that day. “Our common interests are as broad as the continent.” In the final years of his life, Roosevelt took that same message all across this country, from tiny Osawatomie to the heart of New York City, believing that no matter where he went, no matter who he was talking to, everybody would benefit from a country in which everyone gets a fair chance.
And well into our third century as a nation, we have grown and we’ve changed in many ways since Roosevelt’s time. The world is faster and the playing field is larger and the challenges are more complex. But what hasn’t changed — what can never change — are the values that got us this far. We still have a stake in each other’s success. We still believe that this should be a place where you can make it if you try. And we still believe, in the words of the man who called for a New Nationalism all those years ago, “The fundamental rule of our national life,” he said, “the rule which underlies all others — is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together.” And I believe America is on the way up.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post, January 16, 2012
“Still Not Fully American”: Republicans Keep Moving Obama To Europe
This is what progress looks like for a president named Barack Hussein Obama.
Not so long ago, many in conservative and Republican ranks were eager to paint him as an alien creature far removed from American life as most Americans understand it. A determined cadre insisted Obama was not even eligible to be president, claiming he was born outside the United States. Obama eventually put that to rest by making public his birth certificate, which proved he was born in Hawaii.
Fox News falsely reported that he had attended a “madrassa” during his childhood in Indonesia. (He actually went to a public, non-religious school.) And Newt Gingrich concluded that Obama exhibited “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior,” a strange description that’s hard to square with such Obama undertakings as ordering the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Obama’s adversaries have not thrown in the towel in their efforts to distance him from his own country. But they are bringing him closer and closer to home.
Thus did Mitt Romney’s victory speech after the New Hampshire primary link Obama to Europe not once or twice but three times. Obama, Romney said, “wants to turn America into a European-style entitlement society” and “takes his inspiration from the capitals of Europe” as opposed to “the cities and small towns of America.”
“I want you to remember when our White House reflected the best of who we are,” Romney declared, “not the worst of what Europe has become.”
So Obama is still not fully American, in Romney’s telling. But conservatives talk a great deal about defending and preserving Western civilization, which we share with our European friends. So moving Obama from Indonesia and Kenya to Europe seems like a big concession for their side. Who knows? In a few months, Obama might even be moved to some midpoint in the Atlantic.
The Europeanization of Obama is progress in another way. Not so long ago, it was common for the extreme right to accuse liberals of harboring a desire to turn the U.S. into a Soviet-style communist state. Now that the Soviet Union is dead — and China, which claims to be communist, is pioneering an anti-democratic capitalist model — that particular libel is passe. If the very worst the liberals are trying to do is mimic European social democracy, that sure beats creating gulags or imposing commissars.
The most benign reading of Romney’s speech is that he is suggesting Obama’s economic policies will send us into a crisis like the one that has engulfed the European Union. This charge is nonsense. Like it or not, the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have been far more aggressive than their European counterparts in protecting our financial institutions from the sorts of problems that European banks face. And we have a strong federal government, which the European Union lacks. A crisis in Rhode Island would not threaten the nation the way a meltdown in Greece affects the E.U.
And the core premise of Romney’s claim is untrue. The notion that Obama wants to turn the United States into a “European-style entitlement society” is laughable. It’s not even a fair description of Europe, which boasts of some highly productive and innovative capitalist economies. As for Obama, he has bent over backward to strengthen market capitalism, sometimes to the consternation of his own supporters. Yes, Obama is trying to get more people health insurance. Is that a bad idea just because the Europeans have done a better job of this than we have?
But by far the biggest flaw in Romney’s Euro-Obama riff is the implication that there is something terribly wrong about learning from Europe. The genius of the American character is that we have always been willing to take lessons from any country that had something to teach us. We don’t turn away from good ideas just because they didn’t originate here. We refine them and adjust them to suit our needs and our tradition. Openness is an American strength.
Two fine historians, James Kloppenberg and Daniel Rodgers, have written illuminating books on how progressive ideas crisscrossed the Atlantic at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were all happy to learn from Europe. Were they un-American? Then again, no one ever accused them of “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior.” Is it asking too much of Obama’s opponents to acknowledge once and for all that he is really and truly American?
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 15, 2012
After Supporting Health Care Mandate In 1994, Santorum Now Says He Never Supported Mandates
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (R) stepped up his criticism of GOP presidential primary front-runner Mitt Romney on CBS’ Face The Nation this morning, slamming Romney for providing “the basis” for the Affordable Care Act when he signed a comprehensive health reform law while he was governor of Massachusetts.
In addition to providing a model for national health care reform, RomneyCare is to blame for raising taxes, rising health care costs, and, worst of all, Santorum said, an individual mandate requiring people to buy health insurance. That, Santorum said, represented a government intrusion into health care that he never has and never could support:
SANTORUM: Gov. Romney’s plan, as much as he’d like to say it’s not, was the basis of Obamacare. He was for an individual mandate, he was for government top-down control of the health care system in Massachusetts. And it’s led to the highest cost health care in the nation in Massachusetts, it’s led to higher taxes. … It is an absolute disaster. […]
He would not have the clear record that I have…of being for government out of the health care business, being for a plan that is bottom-up, private sector health care reform. Unlike other folks in this race, I’ve had a consistent record over that time of not being for individual mandates. … He has been for individual mandates, I have not.
Watch it:
As Igor Volsky reported last week, however, Santorum supported an individual health insurance mandate during his 1994 Senate campaign, shortly after a host of Senate Republicans had offered the mandate as an alternative to President Clinton’s health reform plan.
And aside from the fact that RomneyCare did lay the groundwork for the Affordable Care Act — Romney repeatedly touted his plan as a national model before the ACA passed — Santorum’s criticisms are largely off-base. Massachusetts’ health costs are rising, but at rates comparable to the national average, and the cost of some premiums has fallen dramatically. Meanwhile, the state has the lowest uninsured rate in the nation, with just 4.7 percent of Bay Staters lacking health insurance.
By: Travis Waldron, Think Progress, January 15, 2012
Mitt Romney’s New Problem: A Rising Sun
Mitt Romney was on the campaign trail in South Carolina yesterday, and brought up the issue he expects to ride into the White House: the U.S. economy. Unfortunately for the former governor, the message isn’t quite the same as it was a few months ago.
In his remarks [Friday], Romney also acknowledged the economy was getting better — something he has said before….
“And [President Obama]’s going to say the economy is getting better,” Romney said. “Thank heavens it’s getting better. It’s getting better not because of him, it’s in spite of him and what he’s done.”
For those keeping track, Romney said twice in three sentences that he believes the economy is “getting better.”
I’ve noticed over the last week, this keeps coming up. Shortly before the New Hampshire primary, Romney said he’s “glad” the economy is improving, but quickly added that President Obama “doesn’t deserve” credit. In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Romney also said the economy is recovering, but said “this president has not helped it.”
And in a debate for the Republican presidential candidates last weekend, Romney made his case this way:
“The president is going to try to take responsibility for things getting better. It’s like the rooster trying to take responsibility for the sun rising. He didn’t do it.”
I believe campaign professionals call this a “losing argument.”
Look, I don’t know whether the recovery will strengthen in 2012. The recent evidence has been mixed; experts’ projections vary widely; and the global threats to the economy remain real and hard to predict. There is, however, room for some optimism and Romney himself believes, in his words, economic conditions are “getting better.”
But as a campaign matter, if Romney is right about a strengthening recovery, he has to realize he’s going to lose. For the entirety of 2011, the former governor had a single message he repeated ad nauseum: Obama made a bad economy worse. It wasn’t true, but so long as the recovery was largely invisible, it was a message that could fool a lot of the people a lot of the time.
Two weeks into 2012, Romney has a new message: don’t give Obama credit for making the economy better. In effect, the Republican is arguing, “Sure, Obama inherited a deep recession. And sure, he took a bunch of steps to turn the economy around. And sure, we’re now seeing more jobs being created and more economic growth. But vote against him anyway.”
This isn’t just a tough sell; it’s an impossible one.
Look again at what Romney said in last weekend’s debate: “The president is going to try to take responsibility for things getting better. It’s like the rooster trying to take responsibility for the sun rising.”
By Romney’s own reasoning, the sun is rising and it’s morning in America. As Jon Chait put it, “This seems like a shockingly weak line — if you concede that it’s morning, you’ve lost the argument.”
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly, Political Animal, January 14, 012
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