2012 Presidential Election, Bain Capital | featured news

While Bain Capital wasn’t alone in using financial engineering to turbo-charge its returns, it was among the most aggressive under Romney’s leadership. Enriching investors by taking leveraged bets isn’t a qualification for a job requiring long-term vision and concern for public welfare.

Trying to shift the presidential campaign narrative away from his personal finances and tenure at Bain Capital, Republican Mitt Romney will launch a fresh assault this week accusing President Obama of political cronyism at the expense of middle-class workers... Obama campaign officials see this as a weak line of attack, in part because, they said, Romney played favorites by steering tax breaks to some companies over others as governor of Massachusetts.

Ed Conard, former Bain Capital Partner, explains the discrepancy in SEC filings that show Mitt Romney was CEO of Bain up until 2002, contrary to Romney’s reports that he left the company in 1999.

In times of crisis, a strong candidate will come up with answers that satisfy the basic questions surrounding the controversy and will make people want to move on to another subject. Romney, however, could not seem to come up with basic messages that resolved the controversies. Many of his answers seemed evasive or overly legalistic. The biggest problem for Romney is that all of his interviews have only increased the questions that political observers, voters and the media have regarding the subject of Bain Capital.

Citing a poll conducted by Global Strategy Group and Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group in the battleground states of Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida, Priorities USA claimed that more voters say Romney’s experience at Bain makes them less likely to vote for him, 37% to 27%. Claiming that its own anti-Bain ads are working, Priorities USA pointed out that in the 11 markets they’ve advertised in within those five states, Obama leads Romney by eight points (49% to 41%) compared with a three-point lead in those without the ads (46% to 43%).

"Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony, or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investments," Stephanie Cutter, Obama deputy campaign manager, told reporters.

President Obama says Mitt Romney's business experience doesn't qualify him for the presidency because it was about making money, not creating jobs. "If you're a head of a large private equity firm or hedge fund, your job is to make money," Obama told CBS News. "It's not to create jobs. It's not even to create a successful business -- it's to make sure that you're maximizing returns for your investor."

Mitt Romney's new TV ad says President Obama's attacks on his jobs record have been "misleading, unfair and untrue." The new ad once again uses Hillary Rodham Clinton to make the Romney campaign's point about Obama, showing an image of her from the 2008 Democratic primary saying "shame on you" to her then-rival for distorting her record.

While the Supreme Court’s upholding of the health-care law was last week’s most important event in historical terms, it will not be the decisive event of the 2012 election. In the long run, polling in swing states suggesting that Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital is hurting him could have larger implications for where this campaign will move.

...But Bain knowingly and far-sightedly made strategic investments, with Romney at the helm, in these pioneering outsourcing firms in the late 1990s, which grew into some of the largest outsourcing and offshoring companies in the world. And Romney and Bain shared in their profits while he was chief executive and after he left. Whether that’s good or bad depends on your politics.