Mitt Romney?s main pitch for the presidency and his rivals? most potentially damaging line of attack represent two opposing answers to what would seem to be a very straightforward question:
What exactly did Romney do as the head of Bain Capital to support his claim that he understands how to create jobs and spur investment?
Continue ReadingDid he, as he claims, help create 100,000 jobs and thereby prove he knows how to do what the country needs most? Or were he and his fellow Harvard MBAs just ?rich people figuring out clever legal ways to loot a company,? as Newt Gingrich claimed last week, or ?vultures,? as Rick Perry claimed this week?
So far, the definitive and comprehensive answers to these questions have proven elusive to even the country?s best journalists because of the very private nature of private equity. The greatest privacy-destroying force known to man ? an American presidential campaign ? is going head-to-head with one of the most secretive redoubts of the American economy and for now, the door of Bain?s vault is holding.
?Bain, even for a private equity firm, is particularly private,? said Josh Kosman, author of ?The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy.? ?Most private equity firms are because once you look behind the numbers, there is much they don?t want you to see.?
But this week the undefined ? and unexplained ? nature of Romney?s Bain experience suddenly exploded as an issue. Gingrich and Perry doubled down on using Bain to paint Romney as a kind of Gordon Gekko figure ? launching the kind of populist attacks that the Romney campaign had long expected from Democrats, who could not conceal their delight, but was a surprise coming from conservative Republicans.
During his victory speech in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, Romney batted away these attacks as the ?bitter politics of envy,? but Romney aides worry that the narrative that is beginning to develop ? especially in South Carolina, where a pro-Gingrich super PAC plans to blanket the airwaves with snippets of ?When Mitt Romney Came to Town,? a documentary about those laid off by companies Bain invested in ? could have a disastrous effect in the general election.
But long before this message war heated up, reporters have been struggling to get to the bottom of Romney?s time at Bain.
In November, Josh Hicks, writing ?The Fact Checker? column in The Washington Post, tried to verify a common Romney claim: ?In those hundreds of businesses we invested in, tens of thousands of jobs net-net were created,? but had to leave its report with ?verdict pending.?
?Neither Bain nor the Romney campaign gave us the information when we asked for it,? Hicks wrote. ?Bain also declined to answer with a yes or no whether its companies created more jobs than it eliminated during Romney?s tenure.?
As the Iowa ad wars heated up in December, Factcheck.org asked the pro-Romney super PAC Restore our Future to back up the claim in the ad it was running in Iowa that Romney created ?thousands of jobs? at Bain. A spokeswoman replied, ?We aren?t supplying that information.?
At the start of January, Romney got more specific in his claims, telling ?Fox and Friends? that ?we helped created over 100,000 new jobs? while at Bain. This time, when queried by the Post?s Glenn Kessler, the Romney campaign backed up the figure by saying it represented the current employment of three companies that Bain had either started or helped grow ? Staples, The Sports Authority and Domino?s.
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