Romney's big contradiction
by David Atkins
The political world is buzzing about Romney's recent difficulties and Democrats' newfound fighting stance, as everyone argues back and forth over how much involvement Romney had or didn't have with Bain Capital from 1999-2002.
The reason it matters is that Bain Capital was involved in some significant outsourcing and offshoring of jobs from 1999 and 2002 that Romney doesn't want to take the blame for. Romney wants the world to believe that even though he was the CEO of the company and took a six-figure plus salary, he wasn't involved in the company's operations. That's going to be a tough sell.
So the merry-go-round of politics will spin round the question of what "involvement" means, why Romney was paid a big salary for doing what he himself says was no work, and so on.
But what is often lost is the larger context. Romney's entire campaign is based on his economic experience with Bain Capital. Sure, he was governor of Massachusetts for a while, but he can't exactly run on that because his signature accomplishment, Romneycare, is a significant political liability for him against the President. It shouldn't be, but because the GOP base would rather that the poor die than receive decent healthcare, Romney can't run on his record as Massachusetts governor. That and that the fact that the Massachusetts jobs picture didn't do so well under his tenure.
Bain Capital, then, is Romney's entire rationale for being President. He's supposed to be the businessman who knows how the economy works. To run away from Bain Capital for any reason, then, isn't just to attempt to deny an embarrassing set of circumstances from the candidate's past. For Romney, to run away from Bain is to run away from the very rationale for his candidacy. To demand that opponents stop talking about your record on the subject that constitutes his sole argument for being president comes off as both laughable and weak.
Of course, the nations' political divide is such that Romney's near catastrophic troubles only cost him marginally at the polls. But in a close contest, that marginal difference is more than enough to be decisive.
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