When the reign at Bain should be (to the public) explained
Why Romney’s so afraid of talking about what he did at Bain
By Jacob Weisberg, Slate, |Posted Tuesday, July 17, 2012, at 5:26 PM ET
The Obama campaign wants what Mitt Romney did at Bain to stay front and center for as long as possible
Mitt Romney seems genuinely stunned that President Obama would question the value of his proudest accomplishment, founding and running Bain Capital for 15 years (or maybe a little bit more). To Romney and others who work in finance, it’s self-evident that what private equity firms like Bain do is beneficial to the economy. Private equity firms buy underperforming businesses and restructure them. With new management and investment, some of these firms thrive while others fail. As a result, investment is allocated more efficiently. This is creative destruction in its pure form and if you question it, they say, you must not believe in capitalism.
To Barack Obama and most liberals, it’s no less obvious that there’s something faulty about this model of financial capitalism as it has been practiced over the past 30 years. Leveraged buyouts, which are what private equity firms do, load companies with debt, extract value for middlemen, and displace workers. Heads-I-win, tails-you-lose practices in the financial sector, regulatory loopholes, and tax advantages produce runaway winners like Romney while middle-class workers lose ground. As the gap between economic victims and executioners grows, the resulting society becomes more unequal and unfair.
Both positions in this argument—that Obama doesn’t believe in capitalism, that Romney doesn’t care about workers—are distortions. But after a week of skirmishing, Obama has the upper hand for reasons that go beyond the campaign-season truism that when one guy wields the hammer, the other guy looks like a nail. Here are five reasons why the Obama campaign wants this subject—what Romney did at Bain, when he left, what he had for lunch when he worked there—to stay front and center for as long as possible.
1. Obama is more eager to make his case about Bain than Romney is. The president is comfortable attacking the negative consequences, if not the fundamental concept of free-market capitalism: outsourcing and offshoring, shuttered factories, cheap Asian imports, declining middle-class wages. These have been familiar resonant notes for Democratic candidates for the past 25 years. Romney, on the other hand, doesn’t much want to defend creative destruction. He boasts about building Bain, but won’t discuss it in detail because it opens up a conversation about those same unattractive consequences: lost jobs, bankruptcies, private pensions dumped onto the federal government. In the case of China, Romney has tried to outhawk Obama, promising to launch what would amount to a trade war beginning his first day in office. When it comes to Detroit, Romney has backed away from his principled position that failed businesses should be allowed to fail. He’s in a corner, because he thinks it’s politically unsound to say what he really believes.
(More here.)
By Jacob Weisberg, Slate, |Posted Tuesday, July 17, 2012, at 5:26 PM ET
The Obama campaign wants what Mitt Romney did at Bain to stay front and center for as long as possible
Mitt Romney seems genuinely stunned that President Obama would question the value of his proudest accomplishment, founding and running Bain Capital for 15 years (or maybe a little bit more). To Romney and others who work in finance, it’s self-evident that what private equity firms like Bain do is beneficial to the economy. Private equity firms buy underperforming businesses and restructure them. With new management and investment, some of these firms thrive while others fail. As a result, investment is allocated more efficiently. This is creative destruction in its pure form and if you question it, they say, you must not believe in capitalism.
To Barack Obama and most liberals, it’s no less obvious that there’s something faulty about this model of financial capitalism as it has been practiced over the past 30 years. Leveraged buyouts, which are what private equity firms do, load companies with debt, extract value for middlemen, and displace workers. Heads-I-win, tails-you-lose practices in the financial sector, regulatory loopholes, and tax advantages produce runaway winners like Romney while middle-class workers lose ground. As the gap between economic victims and executioners grows, the resulting society becomes more unequal and unfair.
Both positions in this argument—that Obama doesn’t believe in capitalism, that Romney doesn’t care about workers—are distortions. But after a week of skirmishing, Obama has the upper hand for reasons that go beyond the campaign-season truism that when one guy wields the hammer, the other guy looks like a nail. Here are five reasons why the Obama campaign wants this subject—what Romney did at Bain, when he left, what he had for lunch when he worked there—to stay front and center for as long as possible.
1. Obama is more eager to make his case about Bain than Romney is. The president is comfortable attacking the negative consequences, if not the fundamental concept of free-market capitalism: outsourcing and offshoring, shuttered factories, cheap Asian imports, declining middle-class wages. These have been familiar resonant notes for Democratic candidates for the past 25 years. Romney, on the other hand, doesn’t much want to defend creative destruction. He boasts about building Bain, but won’t discuss it in detail because it opens up a conversation about those same unattractive consequences: lost jobs, bankruptcies, private pensions dumped onto the federal government. In the case of China, Romney has tried to outhawk Obama, promising to launch what would amount to a trade war beginning his first day in office. When it comes to Detroit, Romney has backed away from his principled position that failed businesses should be allowed to fail. He’s in a corner, because he thinks it’s politically unsound to say what he really believes.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home