Romney's role at Bain under fire
Mitt Romney points as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie claps at right during a campaign rally in Exeter, N.H., Jan. 8, 2012.
/ AP Photo/Elise AmendolaUPDATED 1:02 p.m. ET
On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is getting attacked by opponents looking to be the clear alternative to the former Massachusetts governor.
Romney is widely expected to win New Hampshire Tuesday, but the race for runner-up among former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, Texas Rep. Ron Paul and even former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman is heating up.
Romney has been having trouble garnering more than 25 percent of the vote and the other candidates have been splitting support of conservative Republican voters looking for someone else, but he got some welcome news last week in South Carolina, which holds its primary January 21.
Romney took the lead in the Palmetto state with 37 percent support in the latest CNN/Time/ORC poll released last week and many analysts expect that if Romney wins the first three contests -- he won Iowa last week -- it could become almost impossible for one of his rivals to catch up.
A group supporting Gingrich plans a major television advertising blitz in the Palmetto state, hitting Romney for his record as the head of Bain Capital for the investment firm's first 15 years through 1999. More than $3 million of radio and television ads, first reported by the New York Times, could go a long way in South Carolina, which has picked the eventual Republican nominee in every primary since 1980.
The ads claim that Romney destroyed communities when Bain invested in companies that later shed workers and some even went bankrupt, a charge which had been most often heard from Democrats, not fellow Republicans.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal published a story Monday that attempts to provide a more comprehensive assessment of his tenure at the helm of Bain.
The Journal said a key finding of its analysis was that "Bain produced stellar returns for its investors--yet the bulk of these came from just a small number of its investments. Ten deals produced more than 70 percent of the dollar gains." And four of the ten firms that produced the biggest gains for Bain investors ended up in bankruptcy court.
Of the 77 firms the Journal looked at, about 22 percent of them either reorganized under bankruptcy protection or shuttered altogether within eight years of Bain's initial investment.
The newspaper noted that supporters of Bain say it is unfair to look at the record after eight years, because in many cases the company had either gone public or been sold by then.
But politically, it could be a problem for Romney because Gingrich has decided to push the issue hard. On Sunday, the former House speaker said the firm was comprised of "rich people finding clever legal ways to loot a company."
Romney is pushing back, but he may have created a gaffe of his own in doing so.
On Monday, he said he likes being able to "fire people" who are not up to the job.
He was explaining why he thinks it is better for individuals to have their own insurance because the insurance company can be fired if the services provided are not adequate.
"I want individuals to have their own insurance that means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy it also means if you don't like what they do you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me," he said at a breakfast at the Chamber of Commerce in Nashua, New Hampshire.
"You know if someone doesn't give me a good service that I need I want to say I'm going to go get someone else to provide that service to me," he said.
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Sources, luddite???????????????
We'll wait.
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Why don't you spend some time looking it up yourself?? I'll give you a hint, part of it came from University of Chicago. Otherwise. I'm not your research chump.
From what I understand, Bain took on companies on the verge of bankruptcy and attempted to turn them around so they could spin the company off for a profit later. Companies aren't going bankrupt because they are managing their income and expenses well. It is very naive to think no one will lose their job in cases like that.
If anyone's ever worked at a company that was in trouble and re-emerged later in better shape, we all know you have fewer workers at the end of the process than you did at the start. Many times that includes both workers and management, especially if ownership changes in that time, and especially if that ownership change is a venture capital firm looking to spin you off again later. I've been through it. It's not fun. I've seen capable co-workers shown the door because of bad decisions made way over their heads. Is it fair? No, but at the end of the day, the company survived, those of us left kept our jobs, and we began hiring again when our outlook improved. I don't blame the folks that took us over while we were failing for having to cut expenses. I blame the folks who put us in that position in the first place.
When it doesn't work, it's not a surprise that Bain comes out of it without taking a hard hit, or even a profit once they sell off the assets. Their job is to identify low risk, high reward opportunities. If it doesn't work, no harm to them. If it does, they make a lot of money. They're not a charity.
If they were taking healthy companies, raiding them and firing everyone, I'd understand the big story and fake outrage from people who were never going to vote for Romney to begin with. But if the worst people can come with about him after all this time in the spotlight is he did not save every job and every failing company while at Bain Capital, then he'll sail through this election season unscathed. By most measures, his time there was a success and he's made no secret of the fact that sometimes it didn't work out for the acquired companies.
ROMNEY'S "Business experience" consisted of buying companies, laying off workers, stripping pension funds, and taking the companies public again - 80% of which shortly went bankrupt.
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Your wrong, it was only around 12%. Even taking it out eight years after Bain (Bain had already sold many of the companies) invested in the companies, it's only 22%.
Plenty of people are angry and disappointed with Obama, but what choices do we have?
Romney, yuck! No, thank you. This has been covered. He will be the Republican candidate that no one wanted.
Gingrich? Are you serious? This guy is a walking bomb looking for the place he can do the most damage. He is fat and mean and a hypocrite and a liar. And I think he might be mentally handicapped. Listen to him speak for awhile and judge for yourself. I really do not like the Stay-Puft wife-leaving FannieMaeFreddieMac millionaire.
Santorum? I guess, if we all want to live in some crazy bible-thumping racist hateful and fearful FoxNews version of America Santorum would be great. Good thing for the rest of us that only the Southern states and a few mid-western wasteland states buy this garbage. After the North won the Civil War they should have liberated all the slaves and then cut the South loose. Told them that they could not have slaves and were not part of the US. If only - we could be torturing terrorists from Alabama instead of Afghanistan!
Ron Paul looks like a shriveled up prune. He says some very good things and then immediately after that says some criminally insane things. He is consistent. Consistently annoying and undignified and all over the place. He is right that we should stop giving out foreign aid like it is candy. And we should DEFINITELY CUT OFF ISRAEL. They are a very wealthy country and they are not our ally...why are we giving them billions of dollars in aid and weapons every year? Billions of dollars that we have to borrow from China?
Huntsman? He will probably get some press now that Newt is fading and Santorum is blowing his 15 seconds of fame. Huntsman shares the big Mormon problem with Romney so the Santorum crowd that 'just wants their America bayaaack!' won't care for him.
So down to the wire it looks like a brief surge for Huntsman (we get to know him a little bit and realize that we don't like or trust him either) and then everyone grumbles, grits their teeth and says, 'Romney'?
Ooops, I nearly forgot why I was writing all of this silliness - Sarah Palin and Donald Trump to the rescue...Pal-Rump! Tr-alin?
An excellent question was posed by Chris Wallace yesterday on "Fox News Sunday" - (paraphrased) If Gov. Romney is responsible for the performance of all the companies that Bain Capital invested in during his time as CEO, then is Pres. Obama not responsible for his administration's $500 million investment in Solyndra, which went into bancruptcy?