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City Lights's JournalTPM: Things Are So Bad For Romney, Republicans Are Letting Him Tout RomneyCare
Evan McMorris-Santoro September 28, 2012, 6:23 AM
A little more than 24 hours have passed since Mitt Romney took the base-alienating step of touting the health care law he signed while governor of Massachusetts in an interview with NBC. Unlike the last time his campaign heralded his signature achievement, however, the conservative grumbling was relatively muted.
Why? Because, Republicans say, things are so bad for Romney that they’ll even let him talk up his health care law.
Romney raised the law unprompted during a Wednesday interview with NBC, saying the Massachusetts law — which is very much like the national health care reform law he hopes to eliminate — is evidence that he has a heart.
“Don’t forget — I got everybody in my state insured,” Romney said. “One hundred percent of the kids in our state had health insurance. I don’t think there’s anything that shows more empathy and care about the people of this country than that kind of record.”
A similar statement from a Romney staffer in August led to a total freakout on the right. “This might just be the moment Mitt Romney lost the election,” RedState’s Erick Erickson said at the time. But this week, when the actual candidate was doing it? Not so big a deal.
“Conservatives have bigger fish to fry than worry about doctrine right now,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican consultant based in Florida.
More at TPM.com
NEW ROMNEY VIDEO: In 1985, He Said Bain Would "Harvest" Companies for Profits
This clip shows the young CEO focusing on businesses as targets for his investors, not as job creators or community stakeholders.
—By David Corn | Thu Sep. 27, 2012 3:00 AM PDT
Campaigning for the presidency, Mitt Romney has pointed to his stint as the founder and manager of Bain Capital, a private equity firm, as proof he can rev up the US economy and create jobs at a faster clip than President Barack Obama. Last year, while stumping in Florida, Romney declared, "You'd have a president who has spent his life in business—small business, big business—and who knows something about how jobs are created and how we compete around the world." His campaign spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, has said that Romney's Bain days afford him more expertise than Obama to "focus on job creation and turn around our nation's faltering economy." Romney has even claimed that during his tenure at Bain, "we were able to help create over 100,000 jobs." In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, Romney smacked Obama for having "almost no experience working in a business" and tied that to the sluggish recovery.
But at Bain, Romney's top priority wasn't to boost employment. As the Wall Street Journal recently noted, creating jobs "wasn't the aim of Bain or other private-equity firms, which measure success by returns produced for investors." And, the newspaper reported, Romney's 100,000-jobs claim is tough to evaluate.
Mother Jones has obtained a video from 1985 in which Romney, describing Bain's formation, showed how he viewed the firm's mission. He explained that its goal was to identify potential and hidden value in companies, buy significant stakes in these businesses, and then "harvest them at a significant profit" within five to eight years.
The video was included in a CD-ROM created in 1998 to mark the 25th anniversary of Bain & Company, the consulting firm that gave birth to Bain Capital. Here is the full clip, as it appeared on that CD-ROM (the editing occurred within the original):
More...http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/1985-romney-bain-harvest-firms-profits-video
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