The Obama campaign\u2019s attack on Mitt Romney\u2019s role starting up Bain Capital may go down as one of the worst political misjudgments of recent decades.\u00a0 It is based on an anachronism\u00a0 — a picture of an America that hasn\u2019t existed in decades, if it ever did.<\/p>\n
The attack is a spruced up version of Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s Depression Era assault on \u201ceconomic royalists,\u201d the wealthy elite that he claimed had no concept of the lives of common people.\u00a0 You have heard that same \u201cout of touch\u201d charge leveled at Mr. Romney again and again in the campaign to date.<\/p>\n
The Bain Capital charges have been built on it.\u00a0 They invite voters to adopt a view of economics taken directly from the script of the 1987 iconic film \u201cWall Street,\u201d with Governor Romney cast in Michael Douglas\u2019 role as Gordon Gekko \u2013 and like most Hollywood scripts these charges are heavy on fantasy.<\/p>\n
We all know what is wrong with them, both in specifics and concept.<\/p>\n
The specific shortcomings include slamming the governor for closing a company that Bain did not give up trying to save until several years after he left to take over the Salt Lake City Olympics.<\/p>\n
The conceptual problems are that a big part of Bain\u2019s business was turning around declining firms \u2013 not the kind of safe course that someone who made a pre-presidential career of voting \u201cpresent\u201d would understand.\u00a0 But without firms that will bet on saving losers, where would our economy be?\u00a0 Most American\u2019s understand that risk is required to achieve economic growth.<\/p>\n
For example, Bain under Romney bet on a number of steel companies.\u00a0 Who bets on steel in our time?\u00a0 What a loser industry.\u00a0 And yet, even as one of those companies failed, and has been the focus of an Obama ad, a number worked out, creating vibrant enterprises in a supposedly disappearing field together with the jobs that go with them.<\/p>\n
Here is the paradox: The Obama campaign\u2019s focus on Bain\u2019s losers has ended up calling attention to Bain\u2019s winners \u2013 and amplifying questions about the string of losing bets the president\u2019s investment of public money has produced.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, White House press secretary Jay Carney was pressed on this question of how the president\u2019s losing bets with government funds were different than Mr. Romney\u2019s at Bain.\u00a0 Carney\u2019s answer boiled down to something like the president cared, really cared about those who lost their jobs when Solyndra and others like it failed.\u00a0 A listener might have thought, yeah, but Romney didn\u2019t pour my tax dollars into failures that were run by his friends.<\/p>\n
And yet, something more is going on here than economics.<\/p>\n
In doubling down on its assault against Bain, the Obama Administration has bet that economic attitudes in the United States today are little changed from FDR\u2019s 1930s or Harry Truman\u2019s late 1940s.\u00a0 At that time, close to half the workforce was unionized.\u00a0 The great bulk of these (for the most part) men labored in heavy manufacturing and related industries.\u00a0 They worked for giant corporations, most of which had been founded well before they were born.<\/p>\n
Consider the contrast with today.\u00a0 Today less than ten percent of the private workforce is unionized.\u00a0 Manufacturing output in 2007 was about six times higher than in 1950, but manufacturing employment has been declining as a proportion of the workforce, just as agricultural employment did in the 19th<\/sup> and 20th<\/sup> centuries.\u00a0 Meanwhile the Kauffman Foundation, which studies entrepreneurship, has reported that, since 1980, companies that were five years old or less created all of the net new jobs in the United States.\u00a0 Add it all up and it suggests that appeals to class and envy might not work in our time the way they did in FDR\u2019s.<\/p>\n Here is another paradox: In this race, the, oh, so cool, totally modern incumbent is living in another time.\u00a0 It is the square, straight shooter with a 1950s haircut and manner who sees today\u2019s world as it really is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Obama campaign\u2019s attack on Mitt Romney\u2019s role starting up Bain Capital may go down as one of the worst political misjudgments of recent decades.\u00a0 It is based on an anachronism\u00a0 — a picture of an America that hasn\u2019t existed in decades, if it ever did. The attack is a spruced up version of Franklin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-1236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1236"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1238,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1236\/revisions\/1238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}