As noted in the Jolt, an increasing number of prominent Democrats are publicly doubt the wisdom of demonizing Bain Capital for doing what it did best – attempting to turn around struggling companies, prospering when the turnaround succeeds, moving to bankruptcy when the turnaround efforts fail: Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, former Obama car czar Steven Rattner, former Rep. Harold Ford Jr., Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, and most infamously, Newark Mayor Cory Booker.
Is Romney’s management at Bain fair game for public scrutiny? Absolutely, but the Obama campaign is making its arguments in a ludicrously ham-fisted and inaccurate way.
One can argue that investment and business experience are not perfect training for the Oval Office. (Of course, that’s not all Mitt Romney’s done in his life, looking at his experience as a governor, turning around a scandal-ridden, calamitously mismanaged Olympics, etc.) But what man goes into the office perfectly prepared for the duties of the presidency? Does haberdashery (Truman), Hollywood (Reagan), peanut farming (Carter), the CIA (George H. W. Bush) or baseball team ownership (George W. Bush) prepare a man for the presidency? Or are they best perceived as achievements and a career path from an earlier stage in life that may or may not shape how they approach the presidency? Does the Obama campaign truly want to argue that community organizing is better preparation for the presidency than corporate management? (And a pretty ineffective community organizer at that.) The man who was in the Senate for about ten minutes – okay, two years – before running for president wants to argue that Romney doesn’t have enough government experience to handle the job?
The argument of the Obama camp is that somehow Romney’s work at Bain means he won’t be able to enact policies that will build prosperity. That assertion remains unproven, and we know what we get with another four years:
America has tried a president (and a cabinet!) with exceptionally little private sector experience… and we’ve seen the results.
The man who ran up more than $5 trillion in debt in less than four years tells us we dare not elect Romney, because he’s too focused on the bottom line.
UPDATE: The editors of the Washington Post examine Obama’s insistence that he doesn’t want to demonize all private equity investors – certainly not all of the ones that donate to him! – with the rhetoric in his ad:
What we’re left with is a president who seems content to present an even-handed view of private equity at his news conferences while propounding a much more tendentious one in his campaign advertising.
The president’s tendency to blame his staff appears once again.






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