The Bane of Bain

First, let me say that I'm not a fan of Mitt Romney.  He has flip-flopped on numerous, critical positions over the years in an effort to be politically expedient and increase his perpetual 25% approval rating.  Gingrich was right when he said the only reason Romney isn't a career politician is because he lost to Ted Kennedy in the '90's.  Romney would increase the military budget and continue this absurd practice of policing every corner of the world.  He's a big gov't "conservative," and his mini-Obamacare in Massachusetts may torpedo him completely in a general election.  He's probably conservative, but also probably just the other side of the big government coin - the democrats being the other, other side.  All that being said, the attacks on his record at Bain Capital are unwarranted and inaccurate.

Venture capitalist firms, like Bain, search for opportunities for infusing money, restructuring companies, making them more efficient, and then selling the more valuable company for a profit.  These firms do not survive for the purpose of killing companies, but rather for resurrecting them.  Were they to act in the manner that Gingrich is purporting, they themselves would be out of business.

With Romney, Bain had a 70% success rate.  I have read that the industry average for venture capitalists is somewhere between 15% and 30%.  So Bain was very successful.  It means that 70% of the companies that Bain invested in were turned around, saved, or otherwise became better, contributing to job creation and overall productivity in the marketplace.  That 30% failed does not make Bain, as Rick Perry puts it, a "vulture capitalist" firm.  Jobs are created and lost in a capitalist system, that's just how it works.  But Bain was a glowing success under Romney's watch, and we're all better off for it.

Staples and The Sports Authority are examples of Bain's successes - those companies, instead of going bankrupt and leaving many people unemployed, are now great successes, having hired many people since Bain got involved.

Now, I would expect the liberals to confuse the public about Bain, painting it as a ruthless, evil entity out to destroy companies and steal their money, leaving unemployed workers strewn about in its wake.  That is entirely inaccurate, but that's politics for better or for worse.

The bigger problem is that conservatives like Gingrich and Perry are attacking Romney and Bain.  While they think they are merely bringing down Romney and helping themselves garner a larger percentage of the republican vote, they are actually bringing the entire party down and giving merit (where it doesn't belong) to the liberals' cries that capitalism is economically unjust.  The liberals use this tactic constantly to assist their efforts to change our society from a capitalist one to a socialist one.  All conservatives need to fight this class warfare agenda the liberals are using to bring down the nation.

Gingrich and Perry ought to see the bigger picture:  all the R candidates are on the same side, trying to oust perhaps the worst president ever, so on core issues like capitalism and free markets, they should stick together.  It (attacks on Bain) will ultimately help Romney anyway, because (1) it will exhaust this issue well before the general election is underway, rendering Obama's attacks on Bain outdated, and (2) the facts will bear out that the negative claims are simply not true.  The real danger is that whoever is nominated by the R's may have lost many independent voters because of their anti-capitalist stance through this Bain mission.