Pulling punches on Romney's Wall Street connection
by David Atkins
Newt Gingrich hits Romney where it hurts:
“You have to ask the question, is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money?” [...]
The former Speaker is making the case that, in contrast to good old fashioned businesses who make stuff, Romney and his ilk have instead gamed the system to create a soulless machine that profits from the misery of others. [...]
“I am totally for capitalism, I am for free markets,” Gingrich assured reporters on Monday. “Nobody objects to Bill Gates being extraordinarily rich, they provide a service.” What he instead is concerned about is when an investor receives “six-to-one returns, and the company goes bankrupt.”
I've talked about Newt's free market heresy in attacking Romney before, which is a development I think is far more encouraging for democracy in this country than anything Ron Paul might do.
But mistermix at Balloon Juice points out another important dynamic.
I haven’t seen a Democratic attack on Bain phrased this crisply. Democrats attack Romney’s math on job creation and they are using Randy Johnson, who was laid off in Bain’s gutting of Ampad, as a spokesman. While it’s true that Bain laid people off, the fact that they did so doesn’t in itself make Bain a bad business. Good companies sometimes lay people off. Newt’s attack has more bite because he’s putting Bain in the same boat as the rest of the hated Wall Streeters who almost took this country to ruin and haven’t been punished for their actions.
If Democrats can make this connection, which seems to be an obvious one, they can harness some of the anger that remains over the mortgage crisis and the resulting Great Recession. I might have missed it, but I don’t see that happening. I wonder if it’s because Democrats are afraid of offending deep-pocket Wall Street donors, or because they are afraid of being cast as socialists, or simply because they’re generally inept. But so far, Newt is doing a better job than the DNC.
As with so much else, it's hard to know whether it's a question of corruption, cowardice or incompetence. I'm not particularly convinced that Democrats are somehow more beholden to Wall Street cash and interests than Newt freaking Gingrich.
I think part of this is that Gingrich can get away with making the connection precisely because he's a Republican, in an "only Nixon could go to China" kind of way. Dems feel they would be labeled as Communists for doing likewise, as if not making the charge would somehow prevent Rush Limbaugh from saying it, anyway.
But the most likely explanation to me is that Republicans like Newt have an instinct for making the visceral emotional connection that resonates with voters, while Democrats are generally awful at doing this. Republicans play for the heart; Democrats play for the head. It's totally stereotypical for Democrats to be playing sterile, bloodless numbers games with Mitt Romney's job creation record and worrying about whether Mitt was being taken out of context on "liking to fire" people. Even now there are critics saying that we should be attacking Mitt's ideas, not his method of expressing them.
Putting Mitt's record at Bain Capital and statements about healthcare in the context of Wall Street fat cats and leveraged vulture capital seems like an unfair cheap shot. In high school debate class, Romney's record at Bain is best assessed by a dispassionate look at job creation and job elimination numbers, and his statements about healthcare policy are a separate issue.
But the real world isn't high school debate class. The real world runs on emotional understanding. Context and associative responsibility are everything, and Republicans like Newt get that. Most Democrats simply either don't, or feel too morally superior to make use of that understanding.
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