posted May 24, 2012 11:35 AM            

By placing his career at Bain Capital at the center of his presidential campaign, former buyout artist Mitt Romney has put the private equity industry on trial.

About time.

Romney wants us to believe that critics of private equity are against capitalism. They’re not. They’re against a predatory system created and perpetuated by Wall Street solely to pump its own profits.

Defenders of private equity say firms like Bain, which Romney co-founded in 1984, exist to build businesses, creating jobs and prosperity all the while. "We started Staples, we started the Sports Authority, we started Bright Horizons children centers," Romney said at one of the GOP presidential debates last year. "Heck, we even started a steel mill in a farm field in Indiana. And that steel mill operates today and employs a lot of people."

And Romney also touts Bain's success at taking struggling companies and putting them on a path to profitability. "Sometimes we acquired businesses and tried to turn them around — typically effectively — and created tens of thousands of new jobs," he said at the same debate.

Romney’s whole election pitch turns on the story he tells about his time at Bain, which goes like this: I, Mitt, have a record record of building businesses and creating jobs, and what I did for floundering companies, I'll do for the U.S. economy.

There's only one problem with Romney's story: It doesn’t describe most of what private equity firms actually do. The companies Romney holds up as successes – Staples, Sports Authority et al. – were not Bain private equity deals; they were venture capital investments in companies that Bain neither owned nor ran. All well and good: Venture capital is a good thing – essential for funding the growth of new and developing companies. But Romney didn't make his fortune through venture capital­; he made it through private equity – and private equity, as President Obama pointed out this week, is a very different proposition. "Their priority is to maximize profits," the president said of PE firms, and "that’s not always going to be good for businesses or communities or workers."

Here’s what private equity is really about: A firm like Bain obtains cheap credit and uses it to acquire a company in a "leveraged buyout." "Leverage" refers to the fact that that the company being purchased is forced to pay for about 70 percent of its own acquisition, by taking out loans. If this sounds like an odd arrangement, that's because it is. Imagine a homebuyer purchasing a house and making the bank responsible for repaying its own loan, and you start to get the picture.

O.K., but what about this much more virtuous business of swooping in and restoring struggling companies to financial health? Well, that's not a large part of what private equity firms do, either. In fact, they more typically target profitable, slow-growth market leaders. (Private equity firms presently own companies employing one of every 10 U.S. workers, or 10 million people.)

And that's when the fun starts. Once the buyout is completed, the private equity guys start swinging the meat axe, aggressively cutting costs wherever they can – so that the company can start paying off its new debt – by laying off workers and cutting capital costs. This process often boosts operating profit without a significant hit to the business, but only in the short term; in the long run, the austerity approach makes it difficult for companies to stay competitive, not least because money that would otherwise have been invested in expansion or product development – which might increase revenue down the line – is used to pay off the company's debt.

It takes several years before the impacts of this predatory activity – reduced customer service, inferior products – become fully apparent, but by that time the private equity firm has generally resold the business at a profit and moved on.

But what happens to the companies after they've been resold? It’s not a pretty picture, as I discovered while researching my book The Buyout of America. Consider a few numbers:

• Of the twenty-five companies that private equity firms bought in the 1980s that borrowed more than $1 billion in junk bonds, more than half went bankrupt.
  
• Of the ten biggest buyouts of the 1990s, six, including Saks Department Stores, fared much worse than they likely would have had they not been acquired in leveraged buyouts. Three of the 10 produced mixed results. Only one business performed better than its peers.
  
• As for the 2000s, four of the companies acquired in the ten biggest buyouts of this decade, including Dallas utility Energy Future Holdings, are already in considerable distress.
  
• Private equity-owned companies reduce jobs over their first two years of ownership by 3.6 percent more than their competitors, and that the worst job cuts come in the third year after a buyout, according to a study by the World Economic Forum.

And let's take a look at the record specifically of Bain Capital, which Romney owned from 1992 to 2001.

• 1988: Bain put $10 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-'90s took it public, collecting $184 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
  
• 1992: Bain bought American Pad & Paper, investing $5 million, and collected $107 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
  
• 1993: Bain invested $25 million when buying GS Industries, and received $58 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
  
• 1994: Bain put $27 million down to buy medical equipment maker Dade Behring. Dade borrowed $230 million to buy some of its shares. Dade went bankrupt in 2002.
  
• 1997: Bain invested $41 million when buying Details, and collected at least $70 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003.

Romney owned 100 percent of Bain Capital making him involved in all these deals, which represented more than 20 percent of the money Bain made from its investment funds between 1987 and 1995. Bain’s focus during all this time was leveraged buyouts, and it had not made venture investments since its earliest days.

All of this is bad enough. But leveraged buyouts don't only hurt businesses, workers, and the economy generally – they also short-change taxpayers, via a giant loophole in the tax code that enables companies to deduct loan interest from taxes. The provision was originally intended to encourage borrowing to build new factories, not to finance leveraged buyouts. But, according to Notre Dame Professor Brad Badertscher, private equity-owned companies paid a 22 percent tax rate before being bought, and only 10 percent the year after being acquired. That adds up to a savings of $130 billion in taxes since 2000.

Private equity has legions of defenders, from Wall Street to Washington (the industry is very well connected; four of the past eight U.S. Treasury Secretaries have worked in it); but when they point to the relatively modest venture capital investments of companies like Bain, don't be fooled. Look instead to the way Bain and its peers made the bulk of their money – through leveraged buyouts – and see who made out best in most of the deals: the businesses or the private equity guys, like Mitt Romney.

Josh Kosman is the author of 'The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing The American Economy'.

posted May 24, 2012 01:15 PM            

Oh, and it's all George W Bush's fault too...along with the Irish Potato Famine, the collapse of the Great Wall of China, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Plague of the Middle Ages and various and sundry other evil acts of Bush.

O'Bomber and his Kool-Aid swilling crew are the most pathetic liars in American political history.

posted May 24, 2012 01:24 PM              

as i said before, even newt, whom you touted for president a few weeks ago, went at romney hammer and tongs about his VULTURE CAPITALISM and job destruction.

posted May 24, 2012 01:27 PM            

------------------
Passion, Lust, Desire. Check out my journal

posted May 24, 2012 02:12 PM            

Oh sure, there's the proclamation of "pretending" Romney is the real job killer, but that's not really "pretend" now, is it?

Yes, the economy is mostly on Bush. History will record the actions of Obama that weren't stopped by Republicans did, in fact, help the economy. Further, they may very well reflect that had Republicans gotten out of the way of a lot of the proposals (Nixon's revenue sharing for one) things would have progressed much better.

quote:

---

O'Bomber and his Kool-Aid swilling crew are the most pathetic liars in American political history.

---

posted May 24, 2012 02:27 PM            

O'Bomber's going down.

This election is going to be about jobs. O'Bomber hasn't created even ONE net new job on his watch; he's in the hole jobs wise. Further, he's spent America into virtual bankruptcy and wants to spend more.

On the other hand, Romney both helped create and save thousands of jobs by saving companies in or on the brink of bankruptcy. The thing that freaks Socialists like you out katatonic and you acoustic is that Romney made a profit for himself and for his investors doing so by employing..risking capital.

posted May 24, 2012 02:34 PM              

as for job losses, those tea party governors axing public workers made quite a few of them, and the feds trimmed back too. the private sector is coming up steadily. this mother's day was the biggest the restaurant industry has EVER recorded. yes things are terrible when improvements happen under the wrong president, aren't they?

posted May 24, 2012 02:40 PM            

I'm wouldn't be crowing about a big one day of business too much if I were you katatonic. Average incomes are down all over America..thanks to the O'Bomber economy!

posted May 24, 2012 02:43 PM              

Several investigations ensued, including those by the United States Congress and the three-man, Reagan-appointed Tower Commission. Neither found any evidence that President Reagan himself knew of the extent of the multiple programs.[2][3][7] In the end, fourteen administration officials were indicted, including then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Eleven convictions resulted, some of which were vacated on appeal.[12] The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the presidency of George H. W. Bush, who had been vice-president at the time of the affair.[13]
google irangate/wikipedia

since the POTUS is responsible for everything that happens in his administration, shouldn't ronnie have been penalized for irangate? let's get real.

posted May 24, 2012 02:56 PM            

quote:

---

On the other hand, Romney both helped create and save thousands of jobs by saving companies in or on the brink of bankruptcy.

---

Nope. The article, if you read it, disproved that. You're going to have to prove otherwise if you hope to make such an assertion. Fact of the matter is like I originally said, Obama is going to hammer Romney on Bain.

quote:

---

The thing that freaks Socialists like you out katatonic and you acoustic is that Romney made a profit for himself and for his investors doing so by employing..risking capital.

---

There is virtually nothing that "freaks me out" about that whatsoever. (Neither Kat nor I are Socialists as I keep reminding you. I am a little more Socialist now that I participate in the stock market, but I've never advocated for and I've never seen Kat advocate for the public controlling the country's production.)

posted May 24, 2012 07:09 PM            

Not only is O'Bomber and his Kool-Aid swilling morons the biggest liars in American political history; they're also the biggest hypocrites too.

Now comes the story that those associated with the O'Bomber campaign are also in the very same business as Mitt Romney...and have laid people off left and right in the process! So, how come Romney is a greedy grasping Capitalist bum but these demoscats who did and are doing the same things are choir boys???

You just can't make this stuff up!

The truth is that O'Bomber is a lying Marxist Socialist Progressive bungling, incompetent, empty suit bum who doesn't deserve a second term. O'Bomber was totally unqualified for even the first term...as events have now proved.

Obama national co-chair works in private equity, like Romney
05/24/2012
By Neil Munro

One of President Barack Obama’s top campaign spokesmen is a private equity manager whose firm has shut down several factories and laid off hundreds of people amid a stalled economy.

Federico Pena’s role at Vestar Capital Partners has emerged as Obama’s aides and deputies continue their effort to portray former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney‘s investment career as ruthless, job-destroying, profit-maximizing “vulture capitalism.” Pena has been a partner at Vestar since 2000.

Pena is a former mayor of Denver in swing-state Colorado, a former cabinet member for President Bill Clinton and one of 35 “national co-chairs “ of the president’s 2012 campaign.

The news will likely further undermine the Obama campaign’s effort to focus on Romney’s business practices, rather than Obama’s White House policies, and the resulting debt, deficits and unemployment.

The effort has been stymied by a series of business-friendly Democratic politicians — such as Newark Mayor Cory Booker — who have stepped forward to defend or praise the investment sector.

Pena’s private-equity role was highlighted by CompleteColorado.com, a Drudge-mimicking news aggregator.

Pena has already contributed $5,000 to Obama’s campaign, even though Vestar laid off 1,000 workers from Del Monte this month, closed three factories and laid off 540 people at Solo Cup Co., and fired another 500 workers at BirdsEye food-processor in 2006.

The Pena revelation follows reports highlighting the venture capital careers of two people on the president’s jobs council.

Richard Parsons, chairman of Citigroup, is a senior adviser at Providence Equity Partners, and Mark Gallogly is a co-founder of Centerbridge Partners.

Pena joined Vestar in 1998. “Our strategy is simple: We look for strong management teams at successful companies with excellent growth potential,” according to the company’s website. “We back those teams with the capital and global resources they need to realize that potential and take their companies to the next level.”

posted May 25, 2012 04:39 PM            

Never underestimate the ability of leftists to lie and overlook their own hypocrisy in attacking others for doing exactly what they're doing themselves.

Now, we've had O'Bomber playing Equity Fund Manager, not with his own money but with taxpayer money. How's our little Marxist Socialist Progressive incompetent boob doing?

Not so hot it seems. About 71% of all the so called green energy funds let out to loans or loan guarantees went to his buddies who bundled campaign cash for...guess who?

O'Bomber and his demoscat congressional comrades...that's who.

Of course, leftists could never bring themselves to call this what it really is. Theft of US taxpayer money...more than 11 BILLION. O'Bomber should be impeached, convicted, thrown out of office then, indicted on criminal charges, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned. His merry little band of thieving conspirators should be indicted, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned in a maxium security prison...on the same cell block as O'Bomber.

This crew of thieves are worse than Bernie Madoff!

Forget Bain-Obama's public-equity record is the real scandal
Marc A. Thiessen
May 24

The Washington Post

Despite a growing backlash from his fellow Democrats, President Obama has doubled down on his attacks on Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital. But the strategy could backfire in ways Obama did not anticipate. After all, if Romney's record in private equity is fair game, then so is Obama's record in public equity and that record is not pretty.

Since taking office, Obama has invested billions of taxpayer dollars in private businesses, including as part of his stimulus spending bill. Many of those investments have turned out to be unmitigated disasters leaving in their wake bankruptcies, layoffs, criminal investigations and taxpayers on the hook for billions. Consider just a few examples of Obama's public eqity failures.

Raser Technologies. In 2010, the Obama administration gave Raser a $33 million taxpayer-funded grant to build a power plant in Beaver Creek, Utah. According to the Wall Street Journal, after burning through our tax dollars, the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012. The plant now has fewer than 10 employees, and Raser owes $1.5 million in back taxes.

ECOtality. The Obama administration gave ECOtality $126.2 million in taxpayer money in 2009 for, among other things, the installation of 14,000 electric car chargers in five states. Obama even hosted the company's president, Don Karner, in the first lady's box during the 2010 State of the Union address as an example of a stimulus success story. According to ECOtality's own SEC filings, the company has since incurred more than $45 million in losses and has told the federal government, "We may not achieve or sustain profitability on a quarterly or annual basis in the future."

Worse, according to CBS News the company is under investigation for insider trading, and Karner has been subpoenaed for any and all documentation surrounding the public announcement of the first Department of Energy grant to the company.

Nevada Geothermal Power (NGP). The Obama administration gave NGP a $98.5 million taxpayer loan guarantee in 2010. The New York Times reported last October that the company is in financial turmoil and that [a]fter a series of technical missteps that are draining Nevada Geothermal's cash reserves, its own auditor concluded in a filing released last week that there was significant doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern.

First Solar. The Obama administration provided First Solar with more than $3 billion in loan guarantees for power plants in Arizona and California. According to a Bloomberg Businessweek report last week, the company fell to a record low in Nasdaq Stock Market trading May 4 after reporting $401 million in restructuring costs tied to firing 30 percent of its workforce.

Abound Solar, Inc. The Obama administration gave Abound Solar a $400 million loan guarantee to build photovoltaic panel factories. According to Forbes, in February the company halted production and laid off 180 employees.

Beacon Power. The Obama administration gave Beacon, a green-energy storage company a $43 million loan guarantee. According to CBS News, at the time of the loan, Standard and Poor's had confidentially given the project a dismal outlook of CCC-plus.In the fall of 2011, Beacon received a delisting notice from Nasdaq and filed for bankruptcy.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. A company called SunPower got a $1.2 billion loan guarantee from the Obama administration, and as of January, the company owed more than it was worth. Brightsource got a $1.6 billion loan guarantee and posted a string of net losses totaling $177 million. And, of course, let's not forget Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer that received $535 million in taxpayer-funded loan guarantees and went bankrupt, leaving taxpayers on the hook.

Amazingly, Obama has declared that all the projects received funding based solely on their merits. But as Hoover Institution scholar Peter Schweizer reported in his book, Throw Them All Out, fully 71 percent of the Obama Energy Department's grants and loans went to individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama's National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party.Collectively, these Obama cronies raised $457,834 for his campaign, and they were in turn approved for grants or loans of nearly $11.35 billion. Obama said this week it's not the president's job to make a lot of money for investors. Well, he sure seems to have made a lot of (taxpayer) money for investors in his political machine.

All that cronyism and corruption is catching up with the administration. According to Politico, The Energy Department's inspector general has launched more than 100 criminal investigations related to the department's green-energy programs.

Now the man who made Solyndra a household name says Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital is what this campaign is going to be about. Good luck with that, Mr. President. If Obama wants to attack Romney's alleged private equity failures as chief executive of Bain, he'd better be ready to defend his own massive public equity failures as chief executive of the United States.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/forg et-bain-obamas-public-equity-record-is-the-real-scandal/2012/05/24/gJQAXnXCnU_story.html

posted May 25, 2012 04:45 PM              

and still not seeing the difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism. of course some ventures fail. unless the govt TOOK THOSE companies over their contribution of funds can hardly be called the latter.

posted May 25, 2012 05:06 PM            

Putting money INTO companies does not equate with KILLING companies. Putting money into companies equates with attempting to RESCUE companies which are in financial trouble.

But...just in case you don't know this katatonic.

The US government has absolutely no business making loans to businesses which are on the brink of insolvency or are on the brink of bankruptcy.

The US government is not in the business of business turn-arounds and even if it was, the Marxist, Socialist Barack Hussein O'Bomber would be the very last person on Earth qualified to lead any business turn-around.

posted May 25, 2012 05:12 PM            

Your article is, as usual, flawed. Obama as President is not a private equity manager. He receives no profit for having offered those grants. Nor have all the funds administered by his Administration ended in financial collapse. The bank and auto bailouts were great successes.

The failures cited in this article found funding guarantees via the stimulus through the energy department. You remember the stimulus. Can't very well stimulate without spending the money, can you? And the other side of the "bundler" coin is that these people were simply Capitalist Democrats obviously in industries they and Obama believe in. One doesn't have to see it as a payoff. Just as people interpretted Bush's energy policy as giving perks to various energy sectors, so is Obama's. I didn't hear you calling for Bush's arrest as he crafted an energy policy that favored his favorite energy sectors, did I? Did you know that the Bush Administration was working on helping out Solyndra? (Of course you didn't.) Did you know that Republicans (Waltons) were early backers of Solyndra? http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011 /nov/17/david-plouffe/solyndra-loan-george-w-bush-david-plouffe/

posted May 25, 2012 05:14 PM            

quote:

---

Putting money INTO companies does not equate with KILLING companies. Putting money into companies equates with attempting to RESCUE companies which are in financial trouble.

---

posted May 25, 2012 06:18 PM              

for which reason you won't find rupert murdoch, for instance, allowing anyone else to hold the majority of his shares.

posted May 25, 2012 06:35 PM            

Now Mr. Know Nothing. What about Pena...one of O'Bomber's boys, involved in equity funding..Vestar which laid off 1,000 Del Monte employees THIS MONTH, closed 3 factories, laid off 540 employees at Solo Cup Co. and fired..that's right..FIRED another 500 employees at BirdsEye food processors in 2006.

Not only that Mr. Know Nothing but Richard Parsons who is the chairman of Citigroup is a senior advisor at Providence Equity Partners and Mark Gallogly is co-founder of Centerbridge Partners...both of which are VENTURE CAPITAL companies...in exactly the same business Romney was in!

How about that...Mr. Know Nothing!

Youse guys have egg all over your little leftist faces...from O'Bomber all the way down to the lowest totem on his Kool-Aid swilling crew!

posted May 26, 2012 04:42 PM            

quote:

---

Ummm, excuse me Mr. Know Nothing but Romney was gone from Bain Capital for 2 years..or more when that steel mill went belly up!

---

Who said anything about that Steel Mill, Mr. Actually Knows Nothing?

quote:

---

Now Mr. Know Nothing. What about Pena...one of O'Bomber's boys, involved in equity funding..Vestar which laid off 1,000 Del Monte employees THIS MONTH, closed 3 factories, laid off 540 employees at Solo Cup Co. and fired..that's right..FIRED another 500 employees at BirdsEye food processors in 2006.

---

What about him? Let's stop allowing leveraged takeovers if there's an inevitable problem with them. You know my position.

quote:

---

Not only that Mr. Know Nothing but Richard Parsons who is the chairman of Citigroup is a senior advisor at Providence Equity Partners and Mark Gallogly is co-founder of Centerbridge Partners...both of which are VENTURE CAPITAL companies...in exactly the same business Romney was in!

---

I guess you can't read.

The companies Romney holds up as successes – Staples, Sports Authority et al. – were not Bain private equity deals; they were venture capital investments in companies that Bain neither owned nor ran. All well and good: Venture capital is a good thing – essential for funding the growth of new and developing companies. But Romney didn't make his fortune through venture capital­; he made it through private equity - The first post in this thread

posted May 26, 2012 05:47 PM            

The very worst offenders in the Equity Funding companies are involved with O'Bomber..some in his campaign.

posted May 27, 2012 05:59 PM            

I got an email from my friend Rick Ballard: "There's no point in beating the drum for a sideshow when the clowns have the center ring." That pretty much expressed my feelings about the latest Acme Campaign Strategery: Obama's Attack on Bain Capital and private venture firms.

I was sitting at a boîte near the White House munching my hamburger and downing an adult libation thinking about how stupid this latest Obama campaign move was. On the TV screen Mayor Cory Booker, looking like a hostage, attempted to walk back a bit his criticism of the Obama attack on NBC's "Meet the Press," where he called the criticism of Romney, co-founder and former exec of Bain Capital, "nauseating." Poof, that honest assessment of Booker's let the air out of the anti-Romney, anti-capitalist campaign issue, sending it to the scrap heap of the earlier campaign targets --the War on Women and the Seamus saga. Scrolling underneath Booker on the screen the Chyron announced that former Governor Ed Rendell and ex-Congressman Harold Ford were critical of the President's attack on private equity, too.

DNC biggies were at the table next to me and after a few drinks their voices got so loud I couldn't help overhearing them.

"It's not as if he doesn't need Pennsylvania! "

"Great move, getting the former governor saying he's uncomfortable with the tone of the campaign."

"Let's face it. Obama's only for himself. He didn't go through us when he knocked Hillary out of the running and he's not interested in building up the party in the states. He might find out there's a big cost to pay for this."

"It all started when he demanded that we pass Obamacare, that piece of horse puckey concocted by San Francisco's gift to the Republicans, Pelosi. Cost us the House and almost cost us the Senate."

"Did he help us then by fundraising for state candidates." An angry roar, "No!" went up at the table.

"When I go to corporate donors for money now they laugh in my face. Here's what one of them just emailed me:

'To the extent that Obama's attack is more than simply a campaign poo fling and reflects his view that corporations should share their returns with the public he again shows his legal and economic ignorance. Corporate officers who do not maximize shareholder return are subject to suit for breach of fiduciary responsibilities. '"

They were still moaning over their beer when someone switched the channel to Anderson Cooper who was interviewing Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt. Cooper was intrigued at the notion that the president thought it okay to attack Romney's record at Bain while loading up his campaign coffers with money from Bain executives and other venture capital firms' leaders like Blackstone's Tony James and Jonathan Lavine (an Obama bundler now at Bain).

"How can President Obama attack Mitt Romney on his time at Bain, highlighting only times when Bain cost companies jobs, and at the same time hold high priced fund raisers with the head of another private equity firm that's done work with Bain, the Blackstone Group, there are people who have worked at other private equity firms in his own administration?"[Snip]

But even as Cooper tried to get him to answer the hypocrisy question, LaBolt plowed right through him with more talking points. Five or six times, Cooper tried to get LaBolt to answer that one question, only to be met with uninterrupted talking points, or naked subject changes.

The rest of the interview went on along the same lines.

Mediaite thought LaBolt was ill prepared, but why blame LaBolt? There is no answer to that question that doesn't concede the attack was both overbroad and hypocritical.[

For the most part the latest campaign theme was bombing among both right and left, and in that respect only exceeded the rejection of the campaign's earlier false charges.

ABCnews.go.com reported that Obama's own Job Council has private equity executives on it.

The Washington Post's Marc Thiessen said private equity wasn't the real scandal, Obama's public equity was:

Despite a growing backlash from his fellow Democrats, President Obama has doubled down on his attacks on Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital. But the strategy could backfire in ways Obama did not anticipate. After all, if Romney's record in private equity is fair game, then so is Obama's record in public equity - and that record is not pretty.

Since taking office, Obama has invested billions of taxpayer dollars in private businesses, including as part of his stimulus spending bill. Many of those investments have turned out to be unmitigated disasters - leaving in their wake bankruptcies, layoffs, criminal investigations and taxpayers on the hook for billions . . . . Amazingly, Obama has declared that all the projects received funding "based solely on their merits." But as Hoover Institution scholar Peter Schweizer reported in his book, "Throw Them All Out," fully 71 percent of the Obama Energy Department's grants and loans went to "individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama's National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party."

Jennifer Rubin gave ten reasons evincing why that the Bain attack is bombing:

Unless you've really drunk the Kool-Aid, you probably have the idea that the President Obama's campaign has misfired on the Bain attack. How can you tell? Well:

1. Democratic critics of the Bain attack are piling up.

2. Politico, the ultimate home team paper (root for those to whom you want access), has gone pro-Romney, big time. (h/t David Freddoso)

3. Chris Matthews is having a meltdown.

4. The Romney team is sending around headlines with the subject: Not "The Tuesday Headlines President Obama Was Looking For..." And there are lots and lots of them.

5. Obama campaign manger Ben LaBolt's interview is being sent around - by the Romney team. Anderson Cooper sounds as if the Wall Street Journal editorial board is raking him over the coals.

6. Lefty blogger Jamelle Bouie is trying to argue that Newt Gingrich just was better at this.

7. The Huffington Post would rather hype Gov. Scott Walker's impending win in Wisconsin than feature Bain as the top story.

8. Democrat Mickey Kaus argues that the Bain attack benefits Mitt Romney because it "obviously give[s] him credence as a man who can cut the inefficiencies out of a bloated federal bureaucracy (that still doesn't seem to think it faces in any kind of spending crisis)."

9. The media is going to town on stories like this from ABC News: "The Obama campaign's latest attack tells the story of workers at an Indiana office supply company who lost their jobs after a Bain-owned company named American Pad & Paper (Ampad) took over their company and drove it out of business. Here's what the Obama Web video doesn't mention: A top Obama donor and fundraiser had a much more direct tie to the controversy and actually served on the board of directors at Richardson, Texas-based Ampad, which makes office paper products. Jonathan Lavine is a long-time Bain Capital executive and co-owner of the Boston Celtics. He is also one of President Obama's most prolific fundraisers." Oh well, then it was smart business and a good faith attempt to save the company.

10. The New York Times is very nervous about the drop-off in Obama's fundraising among big donors. "Fund-Raising for Romney Eats Into Obama's Edge." (Anyone think the Bain attack will help?) And, you guessed it, the Bain story isn't on the front page.

The President's embarrassing showing in the Arkansas and Kentucky primaries could be fairly read not just as proof that the Bain attack was bombing but that the entire campaign was on the rocky shoals. In any event, Dennis Miller pegged it just right.

"Money is not as bad as they make it out to be. Trust me, John Lennon cashed every one of the residual checks on "All You Need Is Love."

The campaign announced that President Obama will not be returning the donations he received from Bain Capital executives.

posted May 28, 2012 06:39 AM            

Matthew Continetti - May 25, 2012

We are rapidly approaching the moment at which Washington reevaluates the Obama campaign’s reputation for competence and expertise. Every week, one or several of Obama’s surrogates trip over their own words; every day, Jim Messina and David Plouffe and David Axelrod must scratch their heads in wonder at the mess they are creating. One gaffe is an isolated event. Two is an embarrassment. But three or more form a pattern, one that is damaging not only Obama’s precarious chances for reelection but also the fortunes of the Democratic Party.

The most recent trouble arrived last Sunday in the person of Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who went fantastically off message when he said his fellow Democrats’ attacks on Mitt Romney’s background in private equity are “nauseating.” The Obama for America hazardous waste disposal team leapt into action, forcing Booker to record a hostage-video-like recantation of his comments by the end of the day. It was too late, though. Booker had tested the waters of intra-Democrat dissent and had found they were warm. Dianne Feinstein, Chris Coons, Steve Rattner, Ed Rendell, Artur Davis, Harold Ford Jr., Mark Warner, and Joe Manchin all followed him in.

What Obama intended as an attack on the business practices of Bain Capital transmogrified into a debate over the fairness of that attack. The press hates hypocrites, and it did not take much digging to report that Obama raised more from private equity in the 2008 cycle than any other candidate, and that the president’s negative ad buy went up on the very day he held a $35,800 per plate fundraised in New York City with the president of private equity firm Blackstone.

Not even MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell could reconcile the war on Bain with the fact that Obama has taken more than $200,000 from the likes of Bain Capital managing Director Jonathan Lavine, not to mention tens of thousands from Landmark Partners Chairman Francisco Borges. The man would not even be president without the longstanding support of Chicago’s Pritzker family, which knows something about, in the words of Rep. James Clyburn (D., S.C.), “raping companies and leaving them in debt.”

The hypocrisy runs to the staffing decisions Obama makes. His White House is stuffed with Wall Street types. Two corporate buyout specialists sit on the president’s job council. All three of his chiefs of staff have worked for financial houses. His small business administrator worked in private equity. His former chief technology officer left to join a private equity firm. His former communications director Anita Dunn left the White House and promptly offered her services to protect the private equity executives she had attacked while in government. And yet the president is happy to run unseemly ads arguing private equity firms are job-destroying “vampires” that “suck the life” out of other companies and profit from their demise. Indeed, he informed the country Monday that Romney’s private sector career “is what this campaign is going to be about.”

Really? Obama may spend close to a billion dollars demonizing Bain, only to find that when the national exit poll comes out the night of November 6, “private equity” will not rank at the top of the public’s priorities. There is also a larger danger with shifting the focus of the campaign to such ancillary topics as whether private equity is good or bad: When you run a tactical campaign that targets the news cycle, you run the risk of having the attacks backfire. That is exactly what happened in the case of Booker, and what has happened in other cases as well.

In February, the president’s Chicago team jettisoned the political identity Obama had been building for years. He had already turned off independents by outsourcing legislation to the left-liberals in Congress in 2009, ignoring the bright flashing neon DANGER sign that was Scott Brown’s victory in 2010, and waiting until the last minute to release an economic plan that had no chance of passing in 2011. But it was not until the New York Times reported that Obama had reversed his position on raising money for the Super PACs he had once called a “threat to our democracy” that the bloom truly came off the New Politics rose.

This purported reformer was a classic politician who broke promises and compromised ideals in a relentless quest for cash. Lacking a popular record of accomplishment, and having betrayed his reputation for youthful, sunny, bipartisan Hope and Change, Obama had no other choice but to run a negative campaign in which he tried to paint the alternative candidate as too frightening to govern. So here we are.

The “war on women” message was conceived as a way to frighten all the single ladies into turning out for Obama in the fall. But that narrative quickly collapsed when Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen appeared on CNN in April and proclaimed that Ann Romney had not worked “a day in her life,” a remarkably stupid attack on stay-at-home mothers that Obama Super PAC donor Bill Maher “explained” by saying, “What she meant to say, I think, was that Ann Romney has never gotten her ass out of the house to work.”

America was thus treated to the spectacle of the president, his wife, and the vice president all defending Ann Romney’s honor, and of the White House press secretary pretending that he did not know the well connected Democratic player who had stepped on the campaign’s message. Making matters worse, the Free Beacon revealed that both the White House and Senate Democrats pay female staffers less than male ones.

Joe Biden’s May 6 appearance on Meet the Press turned into a similar disaster when the vice president said he was “absolutely comfortable” with same-sex marriage. That put Biden at odds with his boss, who at that time opposed “men marrying men, women marrying women.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan sided with Biden the next morning. Soon the media wanted to know whether Obama agreed with his subordinates. It was a treat to watch the condescending and preening White House press secretary being pummeled for 21 minutes with questions he could not answer because his bosses at the White House and at the campaign hadn’t the faintest clue of what to do.

Here, too, money was the foremost concern. Major fundraisers in the LGBT community were threatening to withhold cash if Obama did not endorse gay marriage. Jay Carney could not dodge press inquiries forever. ABC correspondent Robin Roberts was rushed from New York to D.C., where the president informed her that Sasha and Malia had helped him evolve into a supporter of same-sex marriage. The timing could not have been worse. The interview aired the day after North Carolina, which had been a swing state and where the Democrats will hold their convention in September, banned gay marriage and civil unions with 61 percent of the vote. Team Obama, however, managed to tell reporters—somehow while keeping a straight face—that they had been planning such a shift all along. The public doesn’t buy it.

Democrats may be able to forget Obama’s campaign finance hypocrisy. They may laugh off the Rosen and Biden gaffes. But Cory Booker’s remarks will haunt them, because in just a few sentences, the mayor exposed a growing rift in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats clawed their way back to the presidency in 1992 thanks to a revolution in Democratic affairs: No longer would his party be captured by its client groups, Bill Clinton promised. The Democrats would not merely be a tool of the unions and the New Class of “helping professions” that rely on government spending for sustenance. Democrats would be pro-business, pro-Wall Street even. Freed from a Democratic Congress after the 1994 elections, Clinton was able to make good on this pledge and restrain spending, reform welfare, cut capital gains taxes, and enjoy an economic boom. His party grew close to Wall Street. It accumulated so much goodwill there and in boardrooms across the country that in 2008 even a former community organizer with roots in the left was able to pull the wool over the eyes of some of America’s most powerful financiers.

posted June 01, 2012 08:20 AM            

Six in ten women voters say the economy and jobs are what they want to hear candidates talk about, according to a May tracking poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Only 5 percent say women’s health or women’s issues are what they want candidates to focus on.