This election is going to be all about the economy. With all the trouble Obama has had trying to pull us out of the pit that Bush/Cheney dumped us in and the Republicans have stonewalled to keep us in, you’d have thought that the GOP could have come up with a better strategy than trying to sell Romney, as a job creator because he ran Bain capital. No question it gave him some business experience, but that doesn’t correlate to him being able to lead the nation out of the swamp of the recession.
Right now the left is attacking Romney for many things that wouldn’t be considered major crimes if he had ignored Bain capital and bothered to develop a legitimate strategy or even one that wasn’t so full of holes.
Look, what Romney did at Bain was no more or less than a hundred other millionaires did in the same field. Sure, Romney bought up companies put them in debt, stripped them of resources and sold them, at the price of thousands of jobs lost – sometimes. Sometimes he saved jobs by downsizing companies that would have gone into the toilet if Bain didn’t step in. Of course Bain always made money, regardless of what happened to the companies they bought, Bain always made money. That’s good business, that’s capitalism. Stockholders love that and there’s no reason they shouldn’t. The problem comes when Romney tries to use that legitimate business tactic as proof that he’s the great job creator.
The reality is that any jobs Bain created were only an accidental consequence of the real purpose of Bain capital, which was to make money for Romney and its investors. It is because of the job creation fantasy that Mitt has been trying to perpetrate, that the left has jumped all over him about Bain.
It’s the same thing about moving jobs overseas. In many cases doing that is just good business. Despite the fact that Republicans hate the rest of the world, it’s out there and we live in it. If we want to be successful in it we sometimes have to bow to the economic considerations that that are the result of international economies.
But knowing all this, wouldn’t you think that Mitt and his advisors would have been reticent about opening that door and letting the crashed companies, the lost US jobs and the creation of overseas jobs out of the closet, especially with all the trouble that Bush/Cheney and the current congress were already giving Obama.
I look at this aspect of Romney’s campaign with all the gaffs over foreign policy and it all looks like Bush redux. The stupidity, the laziness, the ineptitude are all there, just as they were with the dysfunctional little Texas rich kid. Maybe it comes from having it all handed to you, maybe it’s just the result of never having to scramble for it. Both these guys were raised in the expectation that might, (in their cases money) makes right. Mitt just expects it to be his, for no other reason than he wants it – so why should he work for it. Why should he have to come up with a believable, workable strategy that would solve the jobs problem, when all he really has to do is throw out any old line of bullshit and the suckers will gobble it up.
Only the suckers didn’t. No, they didn’t all reject his steaming pile but Obama called him on it, and there he was with a lousy pair of deuces.
The same is probably true for the big tax return hubbub. Harry Reid says Romney won’t release his returns from the time period before he had decided he was running because they will show that despite making billions, he paid no taxes at all. That may or may not be true but what those returns would show, for sure, is a legal manipulation of the tax code that would really make him look bad to the electorate. Even if he had done nothing illegal, which he probably didn’t, it would make him appear to be just another rich guy trying to rip off the country. Not a huge vote getter.
We all, know that because of the Supreme Court screw-up on Citizens United, money has become the biggest factor in this election. With his money Romney could have financed his campaign all by himself, but he’s so used to operating with other people’s money that he has put himself in debt to people like Donald Trump and Sheldon Adelson. Trump because he’s a clown, has made Romney look like a clown and Adelson, because he is more in love with Israel than he is with his own country, has made Romney look like a stooge to a foreign power.