Let me start by announcing that I’m not a Romney fan whatsoever.
In the last few days Mitt’s opponents started hammering him on his record during his time at Bain Capital, for cutting jobs and firing people.
My belief is, that the only thing that these attacks show is, that the attackers have no clue how to turn around a failing entity, and in our case the failing entity is the “United States of America”.
When you are hired to take over a failing company that’s losing money every month, there are two options available to you, either you cut down the size of the business, by letting some workers go, cutting the overhead, and building the profit of the business, so the business can turn into a success story. Or you can make minor changes, and hope it works and if not the business closes down and all employees are out of jobs.
Romney while running Bain Capital made the tough choices, he had to let some employees go in order to save the company, and save the jobs of many more employees, and of course you had some employees that were let go that would be extremely upset and blame all their troubles on Romney. On the other hand you have many more employees who’s jobs were saved, who have their success and stability, thanks to Romney.
So if you are put in charge of saving an entity you would sometimes have to make some sacrifices to obtain the greater benefit.
Now, this experience is a great benefit for Romney in his pursuit of the presidency, rather than a negative. It shows that Mitt has what it takes to turn a unsuccessful over-bloated entity into a smaller successful entity. It shows that Romney – if put in charge of the federal government – would assess every agency and either cut them down to a sustainable size where they can produce results and succeed, or if they’re an unneeded entity, he will abolish them.
And if his opponents are taking this experience of his, and trying to bludgeon him with it, It shows one of two things, either that they’re clueless on how to turn around this failing economy, or that they are ignorant, and trying to exploit the pain of the unemployed, to benefit their own poll numbers.
Either one of he two are bad enough for me to consider not voting for the attacking candidate.
Now let’s look at the spin that the media puts on his record at Bain, the following is from todays Wall Street Journal: “Seventeen of the 77 private-equity targets filed bankruptcy petitions, usually Chapter 11 reorganization, or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain’s investment.” but they didn’t point out that 60 out of the 77 were success stories.
Lets move on in the article “Of these, at least five clearly were still controlled and run by Bain at the time. In three other cases, Bain was a minority investor in a deal run by another buyout firm. In some of the remaining cases, Bain still held a small stake or had just sold out when the bankruptcy filing or shutdown occurred, while in other cases the trouble struck several years after Bain’s exit.”
So even in those bankruptcies, some of them was several years after Bain was out of the picture, and some of them was when Bain was a minority investor. To go out and use this record as a negative against Mitt Romney is at best dishonest, and at worst a outright disgrace.
If anything, Romney’s record at Bain would probably be the only reason I’d vote for him (if I have to).
Let Mitt Romney use these attacks to work for his benefit, and announce that the same thing that happened to these workers in over-bloated private entities, would happen to federal workers in the over-bloated federal government. That he’ll cut down the federal government to a sustainable and workable size, sort can be successful, and get the failing economy back to work.
