DownWithTyranny!: Romney Is Turning Out To Be A Real Bain In The Ass For The GOP

Mitt can't say DWT hasn't warned him over and over. That whole Bain thing-- on which he's basically trying to base his whole appeal as the "non-politician" Mr.-Fixit-Businessman-- is just plain TOXIC. I know from personal experience because Bain worked its magic on Warner Bros Records after AOL dragged the company down the road to ruin. Bain did everything wrong and left the once great company gasping for air like a dead dolphin on the beach. There's basically nothing else other than a great name and a catalogue that long ago stopped growing. Now it's like a money-laundering operation for the Russian mafia and a bond-selling ponzi scheme. And now even Newt Gingrich is using his Bain days against him: "If Governor Romney," the Newtster snidely told the press earlier this week, "would like to give back all the money he's earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain, then I would be glad to then listen to him. And I will bet you $10, not $10,000, that he won't take the offer."

Expect plenty more like that-- and not just from Gingrich (who has basically been in a nasty cat fight with Romney for almost two decades). God only knows what Obama's Chicago team has in store for the hapless Romney. But, right now it is Republicans who are most concerned about the disastrous Bain business model-- buying up and "restructuring" distressed companies-- and how the public is likely to view it as it gets explained to them... over and over and over. Wait 'til people start fixating of what "restructuring" really means. Until now the "GOP’s investor-friendly ethos has made rivals hesitant to use it against him." But that was then, and aside from the cutting Gingrich slam above, Huntsman’s been hinting at Romney’s investment capital years as well, albeit more subtly, making extensive use of a now infamous photo of Bain-era Romney awash in dollar bills in his new website 10kbet.com and an accompanying web video.

Why is the issue coming up all of a sudden? Despite the Tea Party’s anti-bailout streak, it isn’t because Republicans have suddenly decided they hate investors-- Gingrich, for example, got pilloried in the conservative press as anti-capitalist over his “layoffs” line and conspicuously rededicated himself to a “positive” campaign the very next day.

The real subtext is electability. President Obama has made it absolutely clear that this race is going to be about the 99% vs. the 1% on taxes, entitlements, and regulation. Sure we think Bain Capital is a paragon of free market values, Romney’s Republican critics argue, but what about those swing voters who are all too easily swayed the first time they see an ad featuring workers Romney laid off?

“If you can make the argument either directly or indirectly that this makes him unelectable, then you have fundamentally undermined the rationale of his candidacy,” one unaligned Republican strategist skeptical of Romney told TPM.

Behind the scenes, Republicans opposed to Romney have long whispered that Bain is the candidate’s glass jaw, that it killed his Senate campaign in 1994, that he’s shown no sign he’s learned to handle the issue on a national stage because it’s not a big factor in the Republican primaries.

“A main argument Romney has made to Republicans has been that they should hold their noses and vote for him because he has the best chance of beating Obama,” one Republican operative at a rival campaign told TPM. “But a lot of Republicans who have thought through how his record at Bain could be used against him, especially in nasty campaign ads in economically depressed parts of swing states, think Bain is a huge liability and that Democrats will bludgeon him with it. Expect to see a lot more scrutiny of Romney’s record in business, and of Bain, in the next month.”

Influential RedState blogger (and Romney detractor) Erick Erickson has brought up the Bain days in exactly that context, warning voters that “if you are foolish, given that the President intends to campaign on a moral case against success and a lot of people are receptive to it, you might want to put up a candidate who made his money doing leveraged buy outs, laying off people, and restructuring companies.”

Erickson is certainly right that Democrats are waiting to pounce on Romney’s business record. Perhaps the biggest sign of how much oomph Democratic strategists ascribe to the Bain Capital angle, is that they’ve barely used it at all. Even while the DNC and Obama campaign frequently bring up Romney’s wealth (see: bet, $10,000), Bain’s layoffs almost never come up. That’s not an oversight: they’re keeping the powder dry for the general.

...FactCheck.org notably took issue with an ad by pro-Romney independent group Restore Our Future claiming the candidate created “thousands of jobs,” saying they couldn’t find a solid number to back it up and noting examples in which layoffs ultimately led to profits.

“I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation,” Marc Walpow, a managing partner who worked with Romney at Bain, told the Los Angeles Times for a story last month. “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.”