I noted on Saturday that one of the main attacks the Democrats are employing against Mitt Romney
revolves around his 14 years as head of Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm which he co-founded. The argument is that Romney made a fortune as head of a company that was responsible for
the closure of businesses and the laying off of thousands of American workers. Romney’s rebuttal is that this is how free enterprise works — in a debate on Saturday, he said:
That 100,000 figure has already been debunked, most clearly by the Washington Post last week:‘in the free economy, in the private sector, sometimes investments don’t work and you’re not successful… in the business I had, we invested in over 100 different businesses and net-net — taking out the ones where we lost jobs and the ones that we added — those businesses have now added over 100,000 jobs.’
Needless to say, the Democrats have already put out a ‘Mitt’s Bogus Math’ video to make the most of this. But it’s not just the Democrats who are using Bain to hit Romney. ‘Winning Our Future’, a super-PAC supporting Newt Gingrich, released the above video declaring ‘For tens of thousands of Americans, the suffering began when Mitt Romney came to town’. The New York Times reports that the group will spend $3.4 million airing this and similar ads in South Carolina ahead of the primary there on 21 January. Gingrich has also made the same sorts of attacks in person, for example on NBC this morning:‘Fehrnstrom [a Romney spokesman] says the 100,000 figure stems from the growth in jobs from three companies that Romney helped to start or grow while at Bain Capital: Staples (a gain of 89,000 jobs), The Sports Authority (15,000 jobs), and Domino’s (7,900 jobs). This tally obviously does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved — and are based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain.’
Naturally, Romney’s campaign is pushing back against these attacks from his fellow Republican, with a spokeswoman saying:‘They apparently looted the companies, left people unemployed, and walked off with millions of dollars. Look, I’m for capitalism, I’m for people who go in to save a company… but if somebody comes in takes all the money out of your company, and then leaves you bankrupt while they go off with millions, that’s not traditional capitalism.’
But Gingrich and his team say that’s the whole point. Barry Bennett, who produced the video, argues ‘David Axelrod [Obama’s strategist] is going to have a heyday with this, and Republicans need to know this story before we nominate this guy.’‘It’s puzzling to see Speaker Gingrich and his supporters continue their attacks on free enterprise. This is the type of criticism we’ve come to expect from President Obama and his left-wing allies at Moveon.org.’
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