Conservatives Don't Understand Why Bain Is A Real Issue

David Frum's statement on his conception of Bain as a non-issue came yesterday in a Daily Beast post, Bain: The Debate You Have When You Don't Have Ideas. I'm not a huge Obama fan and can't imagine voting for him-- unless I happen to move to a swing state between now and November, in which case I would-- but it's hardly intellectually honest to claim he doesn't have ideas. Whether you agree with them or not, he's offered a plethora of ideas, all of which have been obstructed and destroyed by conservatives in Congress who are more intent on preventing an economic recovery than allowing any of his ideas to solve the problems 8 years of conservative governance have left the country struggling with.

Frum doesn't seem to see the importance of the controversy swirling around Romney's time at Bain as being a real character issue, something that is helping voters understand what kind of man Romney essentially is. His legalistic but thoroughly deceitful and opportunistic filings and excuses for filings with government boards tells voters far more about him than the fact he's a Mormon bishop or a happily married man with a pack of sons who refused to serve in the military or wealthy enough to have a dancing horse and a new elevator for his car collection. (Frum is, however, correct, when he admits Romney has no idea about how to solve the economic problems caused by conservative governance.)

Non-college whites may dislike Barack Obama, but they don’t like corporate raiders either. In the Republican primaries of both 2008 and 2012, Romney consistently lost among Republicans earning less than $100,000 per year. (Back in 2008, Romney’s populist rival Mike Huckabee quipped, “People want to vote for somebody who reminds them of the guy they work with-- not the guy who laid them off.”)

Knowing that, the Romney campaign has strenuously repudiated any Romney responsibility for Bain’s actions in 2000-2002. And when the Obama campaign insisted otherwise, the Romney campaign took the bold step of releasing an ad from the campaign itself-- not some allegedly uncoordinated SuperPAC-- that used the word “liar.”

That was Thursday. Bad luck for them, Thursday was also the day that the Boston Globe posted a big investigation itemizing all the many, many forms that Romney had signed on Bain’s behalf after his 1999 departure.

I'm not saying that Frum won't grow up to be a Nobel Prize winner some day-- it could happen-- but meanwhile, there is one who tried explaining-- also yesterday-- in the NY Times why the character issue about Romney's knee-jerk deceitfulness is indeed a crucial issue in this election cycle... and why Republicans are getting very, very nervous. Conservatives-- from both parties-- don't like Obama using the issue. It tars too many of them and too many of the people who have financed their entire careers. "I agree," writes Krugman, "that the awfulness of Romney’s policy proposals is the main argument against his candidacy. But the Bain focus isn’t a diversion from that issue, it’s complementary. Given the realities of politics-- and of the news media, as I’ll explain in a minute-- any critique of Romney’s policies has to make use of his biography."

The first point is that voters are not policy wonks. They do not go to the Tax Policy Center website to check out distribution tables. And if a politician cites those distribution tables in his speeches, well, politicians say all kinds of things.

Nor, alas, can we rely on the news media to get the essentials of the policy debate across to the public-- and not just because so many people get their news in quick snatches via TV. The sad truth is that the cult of balance still rules. If a Republican candidate announced a plan that in effect sells children into indentured servitude, the news reports would be that “Democrats say” that the plan sells children into indentured servitude, with each quote to that effect matched by a quote from a Republican saying the opposite.

Remember, Republicans have already voted for a plan that would convert Medicare into a system of inadequate vouchers bearing no resemblance to the program we currently have-- yet Factcheck declared Democrats’ claim that this ends Medicare as we know it “lie of the year”.
So running on the real policy issues by itself isn’t going to work. By all means, run on the real issues-- but do so by creating a narrative, a pattern that registers with the public.

And Romney’s biography offers a golden opportunity to do just that. His policy proposals amount to a radical redistribution of income away from the middle class to the very rich; he’s also being highly dishonest about budgets and just about everything else. How to make those true facts credible? By associating them with his business career, which involved a lot of profiting by laying off workers and/or taking away their benefits; his personal finances, which involved so much tax avoidance that he’s afraid to let us see his returns before 2010; his shiftiness over when exactly he left Bain.

You could criticize the biographical focus if it were being used to convey a false impression of where Romney stands, but that’s not what’s going on here; instead, it’s being used to get the truth about the candidate past the noise and the media barrier. The truth is that the Obama campaign would be doing the American people a disservice if it didn’t make the most of Bain.

And for anyone tuning into this debate late, TPM has broken it down very carefully and precisely so people who haven't been paying attention can get up to speed and understand why the timing of Romney's departure from Bain does matter and is not, as Frum terms it "a distraction." In essence, it's all about Romney's responsibility for the deprecations committed by Bain between 1999 and 2002. Romney admits he was chairman, president, CEO, owner, sole shareholder, capo di tutti capi... but swears that otherwise he barely even recalls what that company did for a living. They were outsourcing specialists for a living. And that's even more of a problem for someone running for presidente than hiring undocumented workers to mow the lawns of the various and sundry estates. The Bain model, developed by Romney, is predicated on laying off workers and, basically, pillaging companies, stripping them of value and then selling off the pieces to make profits for the investors. It got uglier and uglier-- and Romney got richer and richer-- in the late '90s and early 2000s.

Beyond specific case studies, the Obama campaign is also trying to use the questions surrounding Romney’s role at Bain to highlight his failure to release more information about his personal finances. The Obama campaign has accused Romney of being the most secretive candidate “since Richard Nixon,” noting he has not released more than a year of tax returns or a list of his campaign bundlers. Romney has asked voters to take him at his word that SEC filings listing him at the top of the Bain hierarchy were formalities and did not tie him to the company’s decision-making.

The Obama campaign says he needs to release minutes of company meetings regarding the various deals in question to prove he really was hands-off, and release more tax returns to clear up his financial relationship with Bain during that period, and to shed light on a variety of affiliated companies in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.