Cory Booker's real mistake
AP Photo
This analysis originally appeared on Slate.
Cory Booker is a famous man of action. The mayor of Newark shovels walkways in heavy snowstorms. Recently, he rushed into a burning building to save a woman. Sunday night he was at it again, this time working fast to remove his foot from his mouth. On Sunday morning's Meet the Press, Booker described President Obama's recent campaigns ads attacking Mitt Romney as "nauseating," comparing them to the foiled $10 million plan to remind voters that Obama was a longtime parishioner of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Booker, who is considered a possible presidential prospect some day, had spent most of the show boasting about Obama's achievements. But when you undermine the central thrust of the president's attack strategy you must repair. By the end of the day, Booker had released a four-minute video trying to explain his comments.
Mayor Booker was wrong on both counts. Bain is fair game, and there's no equivalence between the Obama campaign going after Romney's record at Bain and the proposed super-PAC-funded attack ads attempting to link Obama to his controversial former pastor.
Booker's complaint was that the Obama campaign's ads distracted from the important issues facing voters and that its tone would sour people on the election. In general, it's a reasonable complaint; there's plenty in Obama's campaign that saps voters' hopes and distracts from core issues. But Booker picked the wrong target. Mitt Romney has argued repeatedly that his career at Bain--more so than almost anything else--gives him special insight into how to turn around the U.S. economy. It's well within bounds to put that career under a microscope to assess the truth of his claims.
In campaigns, strategists try to make character assassination look like death by natural causes. Booker was clearly responding to the thrust of the Obama ad, not its specific claims. But Booker should know this is how you know an ad is working: It sends a message without leaving any fingerprints. In this ad, a fired steel worker uses the word vampire to describe Bain. That turns the closing of the steel company--something Romney would describe as downside of the business cycle--into a symbol of Romney's relentless search to feed off the weak. That gut-level message is what also rankled Obama's former car czar, Steve Ratner, and former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford. (The Romney campaign has turned the criticisms of Booker, Ratner, and Ford into a Web ad.)
In a press conference Monday, President Obama said he was not attacking venture capitalists but Romney's specific stewardship. (Good thing, too, since venture capitalists whose companies sometimes fail donate to his campaign.) The president's position raises legitimate questions--all of which Romney has been mum about answering. Romney has asserted that business experience will make him particularly qualified to be president at this moment, but what does that mean? Does it mean he knows how to create jobs, which everyone seems to think is the signature issue of this election? That wasn't really Romney's precise job. His job was to maximize profits. He was very good at it. Bain even made money when companies collapsed and people lost their jobs, but his career shouldn't be defined by the things that went wrong any more than the president should be defined by the failure of Solyndra. Bain recently released a statement defending itself after the Obama campaign highlighted the losses at another plant once owned by the company: "Despite political attacks that emphasize the few companies that have struggled, the facts are that during Bain Capital's ownership, revenues grew in 80 percent of the more than 350 companies in which we have invested." Booker agreed: "If you look at the totality of Bain's business, they've done a lot to grow business and support business."
But what about the job losses? According to the Wall Street Journal, 22 percent of the 77 companies the paper analyzed from Romney's tenure went bankrupt or closed their doors. Another 8 percent lost Bain money. How did Romney decide winners and losers? What does that tell us about how he'll make choices as president? If the market dictated the winners and losers, what should people conclude about the way government might change under his stewardship? If this unpleasant portion of his business experience isn't relevant to the skills he'll need as president, which skills are relevant? Where does he draw the line?
You could argue that a person who has kept his eye on the ball (making profits) while remaining unsentimental about inevitable losses is just the kind of person you want at a time when hard choices must be made. Of course, Romney would never make this argument. It would be political suicide. His posture so far has been essentially pain free. He says hard choices must be made, but he gets nervous when articulating those choices.
It stands to reason that anyone who has been in a senior executive post should have some skill making decisions, and that is the central attribute required of a president. But in business you don't have to deal with politicians as much as you do in the presidency, and you don't have to coddle interest groups nearly as much, either. The more relevant portion of Romney's career should perhaps be his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, where he tried to apply those business practices to government. His jobs record there is more lackluster than the success he had in private business, but there also aren't ready-made horror stories with sympathetic characters. Another reason voters should probably spend more time with Romney's Massachusetts record is to see how he handled politicians of the other party. He'll have to work with them in Washington, which is more polarized than ever. How would he do that? Two of the three promises he makes in his first general election ad--reforming health care and the tax code--will not pass without the help of Democrats.
You might imagine Romney would welcome the chance to engage in this debate about his Bain career. Please: Ask me about this strength of mine. But Romney is reluctant for two reasons. He wants to keep the focus on President Obama's record, and he's not very good at talking about his business experience. He doesn't have the appealing anecdotes a successful small businessman would have. That became readily apparent in a conversation I had with two Ohio men who run their own businesses. They could easily drop stories about chats they'd had on the shop floor with their workers, the stress they'd felt worrying about bankruptcy, and the pride they took in never having laid off a worker. Romney is great at asserting but not very good at storytelling. He hopes that the assertion will be enough. Plus, a full and frank discussion about the trade-offs of capitalism is dangerous territory for a politician. During the 2008 Michigan Republican primary, when John McCain said a reality of the business cycle was that auto jobs were not likely to come back to the state, Mitt Romney clobbered him, even though he probably knew it was true.
If Bain is fair game, is there something about the Obama ad that is out of bounds? The ad received a "mostly true" rating from PolitiFact, which, by the standards of campaign ads, is like a horror film getting a G rating. If your political ads are not getting denounced by the fact-checking organizations, you're doing something wrong. That doesn't mean it's entirely clean: Romney wasn't CEO when the steel plant closed. In fact, one managing director Jonathan Lavine, was there at the time. He is a major Obama contributor. Other Obama campaign ads have gotten worse ratings for truthfulness. One ad attacking Romney ends by saying, "It's just what you'd expect from a guy who had a Swiss bank account." Making a candidate's personal decision stand in for a fundamental character flaw is a less substantive critique than the Bain attacks and more underhanded. That's why Booker was wrong about the Rev. Wright ads that died on the launch pad, which is an even more insidious version of the form.
Above the sniping about the ad, this moment highlights the central issue of this campaign. The president argues that the government needs to play a better role creating opportunity for everyone. What Romney's business experience tells him is that slashing government and freeing the private sector are the best ways to create prosperity. He points to his career at Bain as proof of that. Cory Booker is wrong--this debate is relevant. It is a fight to define Mitt Romney, and it's a fight to define the election.
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A ThinkProgress examination of New Jersey campaign finance records for Booker's first run for Mayor — back in 2002 — suggests a possible reason for his unease with attacks on Bain Capital and venture capital. They were among his earliest and most generous backers.
Contributions to his 2002 campaign from venture capitalists, investors, and big Wall Street bankers brought him more than $115,000 for his 2002 campaign. Among those contributing to his campaign were John Connaughton ($2,000), Steve Pagliuca ($2,200), Jonathan Lavine ($1,000) — all of Bain Capital. While the forms are not totally clear, it appears the campaign raised less than $800,000 total, making this a significant percentage.
He and his slate also jointly raised funds for the "Booker Team for Newark" joint committee. They received more than $450,000 for the 2002 campaign from the sector — including a pair of $15,400 contributions from Bain Capital Managing Directors Joshua Bekenstein and Mark Nunnelly. It appears that for the initial campaign and runoff, the slate raised less than $4 million — again making this a sizable chunk.
If Mitt Romney claims he's qualified to be president because of his deep involvement with the U.S. economy during his time at Bain, then it IS relevant to question what he learned (and, as Ezra Klein explored in the Washington Post yesterday, what he DIDN'T learn) during his time at Bain.
It matters if Bain Capital was strictly an LBO firm or also a venture capital firm. It matters how many jobs Mitt actually created...and how many he destroyed or shipped overseas. It matters if Romney's term as Massachusetts governor taught him useful lessons on dealing with politicians of both parties and with all the people whose lives are deeply affected by how well or poorly a government works. What DID he learn? What DIDN'T he learn?
It's also relevant to ask questions of President Obama, but "What did you learn at the company you led for 25 or 30 years?" is not the same question as "What did you learn at the church you attended?"
As for the "when did Romney leave?" question, I see two issues. First, it takes a while for a sick company to die. (Our Great Recession began, if I remember correctly, in the second quarter of 2007, but Bear, Stearns didn't stumble until March 2008, and the "crash" didn't occur until September 2008.) The fact that a Bain investment didn't go bust until after Romney left does NOT prove that his decisions weren't responsible for its failure.
Beyond that, Romney continued to receive profit percentages on the deals he was involved in for years after he left the firm; he may STILL be receiving deferred compensation on those deals. More power to him if, in addition to making his investors, Bain, and himself rich, the deals produced a productive company, good jobs for American employees, and U.S. economic growth. But if Mitt is still collecting on deals where everybody except Mitt, Bain, and Bain's investors lost out (and taxpayers are paying for pensions), that's something I think the American people deserve to know....
Nothing more, nothing less.
You mean that they don't have this story on the fox political network or conservative hate radio for the far-right extremists?
Obama's ad, and the news release announcing it, packed a lot of claims about Romney's tenure at Bain Capital and how it handled its investment in a Kansas City steel mill.
We are checking this claim: "After purchasing the company, Mitt Romney and his partners loaded it with debt, closed the Kansas City plant and walked away with a healthy profit, leaving hundreds of employees out of work with their pensions in jeopardy."
We found, through corporate filings, interviews and investigations by other news organizations, that the statement is accurate.
The statement's last two claims are solid: Bain (and Romney) made a profit from taking over GST, and the employees lost many benefits their union had negotiated, including supplemental pension payments. The federal government had to step in to shore up the fund.
We rate the claim Mostly True.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/16/barack-obama/obama-ad-claims-romney-bain-left-misery-wake-gst-s/
chevyhotrod: "Update: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac"
Hey chevette -- the topic here is cory booker and willard romney's GREED at bain capital as a vulture capitalist -- not Obama or acorn or fannie mae or even freddie mac!
Why must you always divert and disrupt every thread with your far-right extremist propaganda?
Gotta love how that willard romney stuck the U.S. taxpayers for the employee pensions he robbed, and stuck in an offshore account!
Following the bankruptcy, GS Industries announced it would not provide workers with severance pay, health insurance, life insurance and pension supplements that had been promised.
GS Industries also left the company's pension underfunded by $44 million and in 2002 the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. bailed it out.
LOL! No, he just made the taxpayers pay for his GREED afterwards!
After they bought GST Steel, "Mitt Romney and his partners loaded it with debt, closed the Kansas City plant and walked away with a healthy profit, leaving hundreds of employees out of work with their pensions in jeopardy."
Following the bankruptcy, GS Industries announced it would not provide workers with severance pay, health insurance, life insurance and pension supplements that had been promised.
GS Industries also left the company's pension underfunded by $44 million and in 2002 the U.S. Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. bailed it out.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/16/barack-obama/obama-ad-claims-romney-bain-left-misery-wake-gst-s/
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Hey valleygirl -- looks like your hero willard romney, made the U.S. taxpayers pay for the pensions that he robbed from the employees!
You mean that they don't have this story on the fox political network or conservative hate radio for the far-right extremists?
Obama's ad, and the news release announcing it, packed a lot of claims about Romney's tenure at Bain Capital and how it handled its investment in a Kansas City steel mill.
We are checking this claim: "After purchasing the company, Mitt Romney and his partners loaded it with debt, closed the Kansas City plant and walked away with a healthy profit, leaving hundreds of employees out of work with their pensions in jeopardy."
We found, through corporate filings, interviews and investigations by other news organizations, that the statement is accurate.
The statement's last two claims are solid: Bain (and Romney) made a profit from taking over GST, and the employees lost many benefits their union had negotiated, including supplemental pension payments. The federal government had to step in to shore up the fund.
We rate the claim Mostly True.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/16/barack-obama/obama-ad-claims-romney-bain-left-misery-wake-gst-s/
Why?
The Repubs are running a lib. Lose/lose in November.