The Republican Nomination For President: The Race For The Race For The White House

Last week, Reuters profiled one company, Worldwide Grinding Systems, that went belly up after Bain invested in it. The company not only lost 750 jobs, but the federal government had to come in to bail out its pension fund, while Bain walked away with millions in profits.

And according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, this was far from an isolated incident. In fact, 22 percent of the companies in which Bain invested wound up either in bankruptcy or shutting their doors entirely, while Bain itself has made billions of dollars for its investors:

The Wall Street Journal, aiming for a comprehensive assessment, examined 77 businesses Bain invested in while Mr. Romney led the firm from its 1984 start until early 1999, to see how they fared during Bain’s involvement and shortly afterward.

Among the findings: 22% either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses. An additional 8% ran into so much trouble that all of the money Bain invested was lost. [...]

The Journal analysis shows that in total, Bain produced about $2.5 billion in gains for its investors in the 77 deals, on about $1.1 billion invested. Overall, Bain recorded roughly 50% to 80% annual gains in this period, which experts said was among the best track records for buyout firms in that era.

I welcome a governmental agency making sure that drugs and remedies being sold to the public won't kill people. I don't, however accept that we need such an agency to tell us whether or not these drugs and remedies are effective.

I don't happen to believe that those who hold a pro-choice position necessarily favor or promote abortion. I'm surprised you don't realize it's more complicated than that.

It's thinking like that Joe that shows why we need tort reform.

Next you'll be arguing that ineffective seat belts kill people or malpractice kills people.

January 9, 2012, 3:25 pm
Why Bain Attacks Could Stick to Romney
By MATT BAI

You’ve tried shredding his record, mocking his ideology, assailing his truthfulness. It’s come to not very much. So if you’re Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum or Jon Huntsman or Ron Paul, how, exactly, do you stop Mitt Romney?

The answer is: You probably don’t, or at least not in any mortal way. But in this thing about Bain Capital and the factories it closed, Mr. Romney’s rivals might just have found something he needs to worry about, now and in November.

Like it or not, and most of us don’t, there is a real craft to negative campaigning. For an allegation to do real damage, it has to confirm some narrative about a candidate that voters already fear. And it’s always more effective to undermine the strength of a candidate than it is to underscore a known weakness.

Liberals trying to un-elect George W. Bush in 2004 published entire indictments enumerating his crimes against the English language. None of it amounted to much, because most voters had long since decided that Mr. Bush wasn’t fit for Mensa, and they didn’t especially care.

But conservative attacks on John Kerry’s war record were devastating, precisely because they went directly to the core of his argument. Not only did the “swift-boating” of Mr. Kerry cast doubt on his heroism in Vietnam, but it also added to lingering doubts about his constancy, suggesting that he would change his story when the circumstances demanded it.

To this point, the attacks lobbed at Mr. Romney have been disparate and not terribly persuasive. Like a man hurling whatever stone he can find lying around, Mr. Gingrich has assailed Mr. Romney for lying about negative ads, for changing positions more often than a yogi, for being too moderate. The problem with all of these lines of attack is that they don’t tell anyone anything new.

No Republican who’s voting for Mr. Romney is doing so because they think he’s a granite-spined social conservative who never wavers in his convictions. Romney voters like him because they think he’s the guy who knows how to create jobs, and because supposedly he can win over enough independent voters to unseat President Obama.

(The ads that Mr. Romney’s allies ran against Mr. Gingrich in Iowa, on the other hand, proved eviscerating because they annihilated his confrontational persona. The video of the former speaker sharing that couch with Nancy Pelosi couldn’t have been more disturbing to conservatives had it been the grainy tape from some convenience store, showing Mr. Gingrich with a hoodie and pistol.)

This Bain stuff, however, the 27-minute video and the accompanying ad campaign in South Carolina, is something else. The basic gist, in case you missed it, is that Mr. Romney’s private equity firm routinely made money by buying struggling companies and shuttering their plants — including one in Gaffney, S.C., where more than a hundred steel workers were reportedly laid off.

The attack could prove sticky, for three reasons. First, it takes Mr. Romney’s central rationale as a candidate and turns it into a bludgeoning tool. Mr. Romney, after all, is the guy who knows all about turnarounds, which is why we’re supposed to hire him as our c.e.o. Every day he is forced to defend his business record, as opposed to his stance on abortion or gun control, is a bad day for Mitt Romney.

Second, it casts doubt on Mr. Romney’s aura of electability. Most independent voters may not be ready to take up signs and occupy the local park, but neither are they feeling especially warmly toward Wall Street speculators and bonus-gobbling chief executives at the moment, and the Bain narrative casts Mr. Romney in exactly this light.

And third, the Bain line of attack, more than anything else brandished against Mr. Romney to this point, might bring to the surface an instinctive concern that he’s emotively challenged. I heard some version of this a lot when I visited conservative activists and operatives in South Carolina a few weeks ago — that Mr. Romney seemed plastic and programmed, an impression that could only be exacerbated by the idea that he was laying people off and sleeping just fine.

For all these reasons, you can potentially see the darker side of private equity becoming for Mr. Romney, either in coming primaries or in the fall election, what the morally ambiguous side of soldiering became for Mr. Kerry in 2004. Namely: a means of discrediting his central argument for the White House, and an issue that could all too easily, and unfairly, come to define his essential character.

If Mr. Romney’s rivals stick around and press this case effectively, they may yet keep this primary season alive for several more weeks. If Mr. Romney can’t find a way to quickly blunt the attack, he may be answering for it long after that.

I welcome a governmental agency making sure that drugs and remedies being sold to the public won't kill people. I don't, however accept that we need such an agency to tell us whether or not these drugs and remedies are effective.

I don't know how most Democrats related to Kerry, but I won't be holding my nose when I vote for Romney.

Nope

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

I don't happen to believe that those who hold a pro-choice position necessarily favor or promote abortion. I'm surprised you don't realize it's more complicated than that.

It's not more complicated than that, at all. If you are for allowing something, you are for more of that thing occurring - period. Anything else is trying to be too cute by half - which is evidently your position regarding regulations; you wish to be against them, but don't want to be seen as being for the things that are only held in check by regulations today. I can't see that as an intellectually honest position on your part.

Cycloptichorn

Those who presume to know what's good for us and who are inclined fo force us all to do their bidding are the enemies of freedom.

RCP's poll of polls in NH suggests that-
Romney is at 40%
Paul- 21%
Santorum- 11%
Huntsman- 9%
Gingrich- 9%
Perry- 1%
I am thinking that Romney will come in at 37% followed by Paul at 25%. Huntsman and Santorum will be ahead of Gingrich 11-8%.
Perry will likely withdraw from the race.
The NH primary is open to everyone. That will help Paul.