Re-running the Kennedy campaign against Romney based on Bain deals was predictable and predicted, but this does seem a bit early:
The Democratic National Committee has set up a war room in Iowa with its main focus on Mitt Romney, who is looking more and more likely to win the Republican nomination…..
The DNC brought Randy Johnson to Iowa on Sunday to discuss how he was laid off from his Indiana factory job after Romney’s company, Bain Capital, bought the plant in the early 1990s.
“I really feel he didn’t care about the workers there,” Johnson said, according to reports. “It was all about profit before people.”
Brad Woodhouse, a spokesman for the DNC, kept up the message, telling MSNBC on Monday: “Mitt Romney would have you believe that he was doing something in the private sector akin to what his father was doing: making cars. He wasn’t. He was buying and selling companies and he was making money no matter what it took. If that meant bankrupting them and that made Bain Capital money, well, that was just fine. If it meant laying off workers or outsourcing jobs, that was just fine.”
I thought they would save Randy Johnson for later innings.
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It worked in 1994 against Kennedy? Mother Theresa would have lost that election. Ed conveniently left out that the Democrats tried this when Romney ran for governor and did it work then?
I’m disappointed, DNC. You couldn’t do better than this? C’mon! Where’s that crying widow whose husband lost his job when Bain took over his company, and was suffering from Stage IV stomach cancer, and couldn’t get proper treatment after losing his insurance (which is why we need Obamacare…two birds with one stone) and died shortly thereafter. His blood is on Romney’s hands! Murder!
Or…maybe they’re saving that for the fall campaign? That’s my worry.
Maybe we can hear some more about how Romney’s never been vetted and how he’s the one the democrats want to run against in the fall.
Of course, anyone who knows the full story would realize that randy Johnson was going to lose his job in short order anyway. Bain Capital bought FAILING companies, got them back on their feet and sold them for a profit. That meant laying off a few so the rest could keep their jobs.
What Randy Jonson is therefore complaining about is not that he lost his job — that was a given. He’s actually complaining that he lost his job and others got to keep theirs. it is the politics of envy.
“Ed conveniently left out that the Democrats tried this when Romney ran for governor and did it work then?”
No, not so much. The democrats ran a litle-known and lightweight moderate even mildly conservative candidate and she didn’t come close to pulling out the stops as Kennedy did. Romney poured in $6 million of his own money and still only won by five percentage points. He left office with a 34% approval and would not have won re-election. He simply is not a compelling candidate, leader or figure.
More importantly, he has NEVER demonstrated the ability to deal with the Left and contend with these kinds of attacks. There is nothing imaginative or original about how the Left runs campaigns. They’ll caricature Romney as a clueless, corporatist country-club Wall-Street republican. He’ll make it easy for them.
See this prior post about how poorly Romney did running for Governor; while he won he had a lower % of the vote than the three Republicans who won before him, http://shar.es/W6z2D. Few people even know that he was the fourth (and last) in a string of Republican Governors, because all they know is Ann Coulter’s gibberish about how he “tricked liberals into voting for him.”
A question Professor….could it be that they have discovered that Mitt is not the choice of many of us and are seeking to eliminate him early so they can focus on Rick or Newt?
Shannon O’Brien was a hack from a Democrat hack family. Besides, women rarely win in liberal MA. You exaggerate Romney’s flaws. We survived him as govenor and the country can survive him as president.
That sure says a lot for Romney. You actually have captured my feelings about him: Yes, the US may survive a Romney presidency, but he will not be willing or able to force the course corrections that our country needs to get back to its once best-in-the-world-at-almost-everything status.
There’s a stirring endorsement: we’ll “survive” him. Wonderful. The same old RINO game — kill all conservative possibility in the crib as a preemptive sacrifice to “electability” which is an illusion to begin with. An apology followed by an extortion. I hope I’m not the only one sick to death of this, of having hopes hijacked by the dysfunctional fusion of self-loathing and arrogance in the GOP elite.
No more.
It’s not a question of exaggerating Romney’s flaws, but of pointing out he simply has no record of combating or even comprehending the Left. Ted Kennedy had him in knots; his responses were weird and spastic. It’s like he can’t even develop a conceptual rehearsal of Leftism in his mind. Has he ever even said the words “Left” or “leftist”?
I would hope that we will have a candidate that we can back, not merely survive.
In the 2010 Midterm elections my congressman Mike Fitzpatrick ran against Pelosi lap-dog extraordinaire Patrick Murphy. This was a rematch in which the great fear was Murphy would replay devastating ads showing an unemployed woman who lost her job when Fitzpatrick’s vote for CAFTA supposedly closed a local Jones New York factory. Murphy certainly tried to make the same weak argument. Ignoring the fact the vote had nothing to do with the closing of the factory for a minute, the electorate was far more concerned with Murphy’s own track record rather than a few job losses tangentially connected to Fitzpatrick’s vote.
I personally do not see anything related to job losses at Bain being any more effective than Murphy’s CAFTA ads. Does Obama seriously want to go there on job losses? There is not enough television footage to display the devastation of 4 years of Obama’s failed economic policies.
I think Romney has weaknesses certainly but I don’t really think Bain is one of them. Nearly every argument Obama can sling about Bain presents a golden opportunity to throw it right back in his face. So far I see no reluctance on Mitt’s part to sling it right back either which was a major major problem with McCain. McCain was always trying to look gentlemanly or something. He just looked like a weak toad who needed a damsel to save him from his self-inflicted distress.
Well, Randy I got new for you, 2 GM dealerships in my town were shut down completely, and they were using American taxpayer’s money to prop up other ones in dem districts.
And guess who fired and shut down those 2 GM dealerships??
THAT’S RIGHT! Barry Soetero.
Companies are built and taken down to build other successful ones, like how staples was built by, oh yes, that evil evil Mitt Romney. And guess what? Staples now employes thousands of people, oh that evil man, Romney!
Seriously DNC, this is the best you can come up with?
I understand that Bain provided some initial funding to Staples ($2 million), but haven’t heard how much it invested and helped after that. Since Romney has built a large part of his narrative around Staples, and since I’m sure the Obama team has tracked its history carefully in preparatino for the general, I’d be curious how much more Bain did for Staples.
Yes, but missing the larger point. The truth and economic reality of Bain’s layoffs and creative destruction matter far less than the reality of the attack and Romney’s facility and virility of response. That is to say, his complete lack of one.
I would like to know how many of the companies Bain purchased actually were failing, and whether Romney is vulnerable to claims of corporate raiding. “Investing” in a company does not necessarily mean boosting it as an ongoing business. Sometimes it means taking advantage of a short-term opportunity to strip assets, or divert income from the company into management fees and high-interest loan payments, and similar profiteering.
It’s not anti-conservative to dislike what Romney did at Bain capital. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean you should do it. Bain found well run companies and proceeded to capital raid them. That’s pretty f’d up. It’s not like they were using their “management expertise” to make them run better, they actually did the opposite and ran kb toys into the ground
So then Randy Johnson got a job with the DNC … and lived happily ever after.
If companies were not viable, they can’t just keep workers on without profits. Of course that is a revelation to Obama and the left. But if Romney/Bain raided/gutted them for Bain’s profit, and actually caused the bankruptcy, that’s much different.
The guy in the tape isn’t really too harsh on Romney, and even said he felt Romney was genuinely sorry the company failed. But then he says .. “I think they really just cared about profits, not the people”.
This could be a positive for Romney, if he can counter that companies MUST make a profit in order to pay the people it cares about.
Bailouts are not an option. Taxing too much to support a bailout makes it harder for good companies to be profitable. Mitt can use Solindra or GM Volts as examples. Business should be profit driven, not subsidy driven. Spreading the wealth to failed business models makes us weaker, not stronger.
Well, Randy Johnson was a “starter” his whole career. He never was a “reliev…oh, you’re not talking about the MLB pitcher.
[…] is about to be attacked from the right and the left as a “job killer” at Bain Capital – but here’s the Catch 22 on that line of reasoning; the very reason that […]
Personal investment acumen doesn’t necessarily translate into governing acumen, nor is it necessarily akin to entrepreneurship. Bankrupting the United States to profit creditors isn’t an option. Nor is selling off unproductive areas of the country. We don’t really know who had the ideas or made the major decisions at Bain Capital. As for academic achievement, while commendable, that also applies to, e.g. Paul Krugman (Yale summa cum laude economics and MIT PhD); and the brainiacs who made personal millions/billions inventing/trading mortgage derivatives.
As I’ve said before, if Romney is not bound by an NDA, his “out” will probably come when he discloses who the Bain investors were that benefited from the AMPAD deal.
I suspect many people are unaware that oftentimes the biggest investors in private equity deals are union pension funds and college endowments. In other words blue collar retirees and colleges and universities that employ left wing academics.
And even if he is prohibited by an NDA from saying who the specific investors in the AMPAD deal were, he can at least talk generally about the type of investors on whose behalf Bain typically invests.
I heard it said in the clip that Randy Johnson is now affiliated with the United Steelworkers. It would be a real kick in the pants if the Steelworkers pension plan was a Bain investor – either then or now.
[…] is about to be attacked from the right and the left as a “job killer” at Bain Capital – but here’s the Catch 22 on that line of reasoning; the very reason that […]