The New York Times
January 10, 2012
Shaken by Attacks on Romney’s Past Work, Campaign Tries to Douse Flames
By MICHAEL BARBARO and ASHLEY PARKER
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Campaign advisers to former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, stung by unexpectedly fierce attacks from Republican rivals on his career as a corporate buyout specialist, are scrambling to avoid a prolonged and nasty battle over his business record before it leaves lasting damage to the front-runner.
Although the advisers had always expected that Democrats would malign Mr. Romney’s work of buying and selling companies, they were largely unprepared for an assault that came so early in the campaign and from within the ranks of their own party, those involved in the campaign discussions said.
Even as Mr. Romney coasted to victory in New Hampshire, they worry that the critique could prove more potent as the race shifts to South Carolina, where shuttered mills dot the landscape, unemployment is higher and suspicion of financial elites is not limited to left-leaning voters.
Some advisers to Romney argue that the most forceful way to rebut the mounting criticism is to prominently tell the stories of winners as well as the losers in the world of private equity: municipal pension funds that invest in Bain, for example, and rank-and-file workers hired by the companies that Mr. Romney helped turn around.
The campaign intends to cast Mr. Romney, the founder and chief executive of Bain Capital, as a defender of market capitalism, a bedrock principle of Republicanism, and to suggest that those who assail his business background are outside the party’s mainstream.
In his victory speech Tuesday night, Mr. Romney lamented that “desperate Republicans” were attacking the free enterprise system and the very notion of success.
“This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation,” he said. “The country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy.”
That message was echoed by Mr. Romney’s surrogates and embraced by a number of influential conservatives on Tuesday, from Rush Limbaugh to Michelle Malkin and the Club for Growth.
“It’s oddly uniting conservatives around him,” said Jim Dyke, a Republican strategist based in Charleston.
The attacks on Mr. Romney are especially unsettling to his campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, who worries that a narrative depicting Romney as a heartless corporate raider will drag down his favorability rating and be sustained by the Obama campaign, said two people told of the internal discussions. (Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior strategist for Mr. Romney, played down such concerns. “I wouldn’t read too much into the rumors,” he said.)
While his campaign advisers generally agree that Mr. Romney must explain his work at Bain, they are wary of engaging in an exhaustive public examination of the nearly 100 deals he was involved in, anxious that it could bog him down in the inevitably messy details of fixing troubled companies, whether they are job cuts or big financial payouts.
His rivals, however, are eager to delve deeply into the particulars of what they view as Mr. Romney’s biggest political vulnerability.
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is zeroing in on two companies that, under Bain’s supervision, together laid off hundreds of workers in South Carolina. On Tuesday, in Fort Mill, S.C., Mr. Perry compared buyout firms like Bain to predatory animals.
“They’re just vultures,” Mr. Perry said. “They’re vultures that are sitting out there on the tree limb waiting for the company to get sick, and then they swoop in, they eat the carcass, they leave with that and they leave the skeleton.”
But by far the most aggressive assault on Mr. Romney’s time at Bain will come from allies of Newt Gingrich, who plan to saturate South Carolina’s airwaves with excerpts from a scathing 30-minute movie about how Bain Capital disrupted the lives of everyday workers.
In response on Monday, Restore Our Future, the leading “super PAC” backing Mr. Romney, reserved $2.3 million worth of television advertising time in South Carolina, hoping to match the $3.4 million campaign of negative television and radio ads from a super PAC promoting Mr. Gingrich, Winning Our Future.
The group supporting Mr. Romney pulled a positive advertisement in South Carolina featuring Mr. Romney, substituting one that is critical of the former speaker.
Republican operatives, while expressing dismay at the critique of Bain Capital, nevertheless acknowledged that it could prove powerful in coloring voters’ perceptions of Mr. Romney as he enters South Carolina, a state where he has struggled in the past.
Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist who is not aligned with a candidate this year, said that Mr. Romney’s work in private equity — an industry that uses large amounts of debt to buy companies and then seeks to sell them at a profit — is “easily caricatured.”
“This will be a major liability that Mitt Romney brings into the race,” he said.
The broadsides against his time at Bain may be particularly resonant because they reinforce a longstanding perception of Mr. Romney, a multimillionaire with three homes, as someone far removed from the concerns of everyday voters.
Mr. Romney seemed to call attention inadvertently to that image in New Hampshire in a remark that he had feared receiving a “pink slip” during his professional life, an assertion that seemed tin-eared coming from the son of a wealthy auto executive and governor of Michigan.
“They are not dissimilar,” said Mr. Schmidt, “to a category of comments that John Kerry made that are a combination of strange and aloof and make the task of connecting with ordinary voters all the more difficult.”
Aides to Mr. Romney are discussing a wide range of ways to push back, including highlighting the experiences of ordinary employees who benefited from Mr. Romney’s investments at companies like Staples, the Sports Authority and Dominos, which thrived after Bain bought or invested in them.
“What should not be forgotten,” said Tom Stemberg, a founder of Staples and a Romney friend, “is that while C.E.O.’s benefited from Mitt’s help, it’s thousands of rank-and-file associates at the company Mitt helped who really benefited in the long run.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/11/us/politics/11romney.html?hp