Conservatives are furious with Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry for attacking Romney [View all]

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/romneys-gop-critics-undermining-his-general-election-argument/2012/01/10/gIQArYIVoP_blog.html

Posted at 01:17 PM ET, 01/10/2012

Romney’s GOP critics undermining his general election argument

By Greg Sargent

Conservatives are furious with GOP candidates like Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry for attacking Mitt Romney’s Bain tenure as capitalism run amok. Gingrich has claimed that Bain “looted” other companies, and Perry today slammed enterprises like Bain as “vultures” who “eat the carcass” of its victims, prompting a fresh round of outrage from the right.

Conservatives have good reason for being angry about this. In attacking Romney’s Bain years in these terms, his fellow Republicans are mainstreaming and giving bipartisan legitimacy to one of the chief arguments Obama and Dems will use against Romney in the general election. They are badly undermining Romney’s whole pushback against it — giving Dems an advantage in the coming war to define Romney’s Bain years, which will be as central to the general election narrative as the war over John Kerry’s Vietnam service was in 2004.