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Jonathan Chait, writing on the New York magazine site, calls Newt Gingrich onto the carpet for attacking Mitt Romney’s business track record in a way that will certainly be used by the Obama campaign if Romney becomes the Republican nominee.
Apparently, Gingrich has hooked up with a right-wing casino mogul, Sheldon Adelson, who will provide the former House speaker with $5 million to launch a South Carolina ad campaign bashing Romney’s career at Bain Capital.
But Gingrich, a conservative, is hammering Romney in much the same way as liberal Democrats: Romney destroyed jobs in order to generate huge profits.
Here’s a portion of what Chait wrote:
“Politically, the ads are devastating to Romney, whose message against Obama is that he is a ‘job creator’ who understands the private economy. The message of the ads is that his private-sector experience consists of looting companies and destroying the livelihoods of working-class people. The victims testifying in his ads are the working-class people who have suffered economic stagnation over the last three decades that was accelerated by the revolutionary changes to the economy of which Romney was at the forefront.
“… The political effect of these ads is to turn Romney’s chief selling point into a liability — his private-sector experience becomes an indicator not that he will fix the economy but that he will help the already-rich. It’s a smash-you-over-the-head blunt message, with ominous music and storybook dialogue. At one point, the narrator says of Bain’s executives, “their greed was only matched by their willingness to do anything to make millions in profits.”
“… The substantive merits of the attack are, obviously, a lot murkier. Romney’s job at Bain was a classic piece of creative destruction. The proper working of a free market system relies on ruthlessly identifying and closing down non-competitive business concerns. Gingrich’s assault relies on drawing a distinction between real capitalism and the ‘looting’ undertaken by Bain Capital. ‘If somebody comes in, takes all the money out of your company, and then leaves you bankrupt while they go off with millions,’ he argues, ‘that’s not traditional capitalism.’
“The distinction is utterly ephemeral. It’s a way of saying you’d like all the nice aspects of capitalism without the nasty ones — creating new firms and products without liquidating old ones… On the other hand, bringing ourselves face-to-face with the very real victims of Romney’s business career explodes his fairy tale of having been a ‘job creator.’ He was in the business of creating wealth, not jobs. Capitalism increases a society’s standard of living, but it does not increase its rate of employment. If your goal is simply to give every willing worker a job, then socialism is the system you want.”
You can read more here.
