Most candidates haven’t been involved in the kind of hands-on overhauls of businesses, and business models, that Romney was. He was there while big decisions and fateful choices about the livelihoods of thousands were made. This should be an advantage for a candidate, but instead it makes harder for Romney to credibly spin his grand economic narrative, because the real story cuts against it (you too can live your own Horatio Alger story – unless you have the misfortune meet up with someone like me). In politics, sometimes, the less you know, the easier it is to fake it. Which is what Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich are doing, suddenly embracing what three weeks ago they called socialism and attacking Romney’s Bain experience:
“Look, I’m for capitalism,” Gingrich said on NBC’s “Today” show. “But if somebody comes in, takes all the money out of your company and then leaves you bankrupt while they go off with millions, that’s not traditional capitalism.”
Newt wants to keep the GOP’s fantasy capitalism and just exclude Romney from it. I’d like to see Romney acknowledge some of the realities here: that there were costs as well as benefits to what he and his colleagues at Bain Capital did. Instead, he has implausibly portrayed himself as a sunny creator of 100,000 jobs out to “save the soul of America.” It would be ironic if this were the moment that the 1980s-vintage Republican grand narrative became unsustainable. |
