Robert Shrum: Bain is just chapter one in the Book of Romney
Bain is just chapter one in the Book of Romney
Republicans are desperate to declare Obama's attacks on Mitt's business background off-limits. But in the life of Romney, vulture capitalism is an inescapable theme
posted on May 21, 2012, at 12:00 PM
Robert Shrum
The real Mitt Romney is finally running for president but not in his own first television spot, a superficial checklist of issues which provides no insight into who he is or what makes him tick. It's the Obama commercial on Bain and the destruction of GST Steel that starkly reveals the real Romney as a vulture capitalist. And this is just the beginning of what we will hear about Bain, and of a narrative arc that will position Romney as the candidate of the few, by the few, and for the few.
The Obama ad is so powerful because, like the Ted Kennedy ads in Romney's losing 1994 Senate race, the story is told not by a smoothly modulated professional narrator, but by working people whose jobs and lives were shredded so Mitt and his men could amass their millions. One of the workers voted for John McCain in 2008 and for George W. Bush before that. Now these authentic blue-collar voices, these Reagan Democrats, are talking directly to swing voters to folks who could be brothers or sisters, friends or cousins in the battleground industrial states. It's a different kind of political media gritty, unslick, and therefore quite convincing.
snip//
This is the false banner under which he campaigns the claim that he is a job-creating businessman. The total has oscillated from 10,000 jobs to 100,000, to maybe not exactly that. But the abstract number, unsubstantiated and as soulless as Mitt himself often seems, is no match for a steel worker named Jack Cobb, discarded in Romney's profiteering deal, but sad and defiant now: "To get up on national TV and brag about making jobs
he has destroyed thousands of people's careers, lifetimes, just destroying people."
The ads shatter the candidate's fundamental rationale that with his business experience in creating jobs, he's Mr. Fix-It for the economy. It's a thin rationale, but voters might have believed it. Now disbelief will deepen as the Obama campaign rolls out a dishonor roll of Bain's depredations. The campaign already has a website that state by state just coincidentally the battleground states, of course pinpoints other companies exploited and extinguished by Bain.
I suspect that Romney will eventually have to abandon his strategy of treating the election as a referendum and not a choice and attempt to defend his business record in paid media. The 1994 outcome suggests that any other course is a road to defeat.
more...
http://theweek.com/bullpen/column/228222/bain-is-just-chapter-one-in-the-book-of-romney
ladjf
(17,320 posts)JoePhilly
(27,787 posts)liberalnationalist
(170 posts)he has the best commentary
Raw Money is going to get slamed...now all we need to do is bring up his citizenship (was Raw money born in Mexico) , his religion (Raw Money's mormanism's plan to take over america and make it a theocracy), and tie it to the Catholic Bishops and that Dolan creep
we have to take down the rightwing and Raw Money is as good as an excuse to do it as any
NBachers
(17,149 posts)How many lifetimes of getting up early, working a body to fatigue day after day, year after year?
This isn't just money Rmoney has stolen - it's human lives. Human hopes. Human labor.
Predator indeed
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)Buy a company out, and, if you do it right, you get all or part of the pension money for free.
It adds up, and then they wonder why baby boomers haven't saved enough for retirement.
Alcibiades
(5,061 posts)to have been part of every financial debacle--the S&L crisis, the various hedge funds, the Enron-induced energy crisis in California, the tech bubble, the housing bubble, the derivative bubble, and the offshoring of jobs and the deindustrialization of America--in the last 30 years.
His knack for turning a profit usually comes only at the expense of middle class Americans and the national interest.
kristopher
(29,798 posts)She says it is off limits and we are only allowed to talk about Obama.
Good read.
xxqqqzme
(14,887 posts)because it is ALL there is. The rethugs already know rmoney cannot win where he was governor or in any of the states where he owns a house. So Bain is IT. That is all there is - literally an empty suit.
Uncle Joe
(58,459 posts)Thanks for the thread, babylonsister.