Behold a pale horse ... Mitt's fatal flaw

[autorank]

Behold a pale horse ... Mitt's fatal flaw

By Michael Collins



The South Carolina exit poll (sponsored by the mainstream media) had a new question for voters as they left their polling places. They were asked if they had a positive or negative opinion of Mitt Romney's background as an investor. Investor refers to Romney's time as an investment banker with Bain Capital and can be taken as a proxy for a pro or anti-Wall Street/financial elite stance. ...

Gingrich's skillfully applied phony populism produced around 80,000 votes based on the results for the investor question. His margin of victory over Romney was 76,000. The issue is potent and will be repeated in upcoming contests.

Link: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Behold-a-pale-horse---Mi-by-Michael-Collins-120122-633.html

[Scuba]

1. Pale horse's ass is more like it.

[autorank]

4. LOL ... they're all horse's asses

The Republican debates are a complete freak show. Newt's the smartest guy in the room, which shows how smart the rest of them are.

[Journeyman]

2. It'll be nice if the Florida exit polls ask people's opinion of Newtnik's ethics problems. . .

[gateley]

3. Wow. We have to better expose exactly HOW he garnered those obscene profits. nt

[sad sally]

5. Saved a bundle by not paying the pesky taxes on those profits.

Romney does not just have money invested down in the Cayman Islands. Apparently his money is invested in a whole host of offshore tax havens.

The following quote comes from a Reuters article....

Bain funds in which Romney is invested are scattered from Delaware to the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, Ireland and Hong Kong, according to a Reuters analysis of securities filings.

So is there anything wrong with this? Well, it depends on how you define "wrong". What Romney is doing is perfectly legal.

Washington lawyer Jack Blum recently told ABC News the following about Romney's finances....

"His personal finances are a poster child of what's wrong with the American tax system"

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/the-global-elite-are-hiding-18-trillion-dollars-in-offshore-banks#comments?du

[karynnj]

10. If it means anything, Blum is the guy who headed the BCCI investigation

for Kerry and was one of the witnesses who testified before the Senate Finance committee on tax evasion using the Cayman Islands.

[autorank]

6. So True

But the message is getting across. Even a sizable faction of Republican primary voters get the message on Wall Street.

[mfcorey1]

7. Illuminati alive and corrupting!

[Hubert Flottz]

8. Why would you trust the top job in your country to a...

Man you'd be afraid to leave your daughter alone with?

[karynnj]

9. I disagree with their conclusions

Just as the media SHOULD have discounted Romney's win of the neighboring state with its unusually secular Republican voters, the media should discount Gingrich's win in his neighboring, unusually heavy tea party voters. First, if you look just at the people who answered the question, it looks like about 65% thought it positive and 29% thought it negative. Ignoring the non responses, this means that 69% were positive. Though this likely shows some erosion from what the numbers might have been before the attacks, this shows that more than twice the number of people who voted for Romney - reject that attack.

Another way of taking this, is to consider what percent of Gingrich's voters reject Gingrich's toughest attack on Romney - his work at Bain. From the chart, Gingrich got about .35 of the people who thought Bain (.65 of the total ) was positive and .5 of the people who thought it negative (.28 of the total). ignoring the roughly .07 of those answering the exit poll who failed to answer that question, you can say that for the Gingrich voters who answered the question, .65*.6 were positive and .28*.5 were negative. So, of the Gingrich voters who answered the question, about 62% ( .65*.35 / (.65*.35 + .28*.5) ) thought Bain was positive.

Doing the same for Santorum and Paul, shows that that charge resonated more with them than with Gingrich's voters.

Paul ( .65*.09/ (.65*.09 + .28*.21) ) about 50% who responded thought Bain positive

Santorum ( .65*.12/ (.65*.12 + .28*.20) ) about 58% who responded thought Bain positive.

Caveat - I was rather careless in pulling off the percents from the charts, so these numbers are somewhat off but they are in the ball park - and done because you can not just compare the size of the red and blue bars of a candidate to get the percent for or against.

To me, this shows that if Romney can not regain many people like those who voted for other candidates, the reason is NOT Bain.