Bain Attacks Erode Mitt's Favorables

Yesterday, I touched briefly on two contradictory polls on the issue of Team Obama's Bain attacks and whether they were hurting Mitt Romney. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that "By more than 2-1, 63%-29%, those surveyed say Romney's background in business, including his tenure at the private equity firm Bain Capital, would cause him to make good decisions, not bad ones, in dealing with the nation's economic problems over the next four years." So, despite the Obama attacks on his Bain record, Gallup found most thought Romney's Bain years were a positive.

But a Reuters/Ipsos poll released the very next day found that over a third of respondents said "that what they had heard about Romney's taxes and his time at Bain Capital private equity firm had given them a less favorable impression of the Republican candidate."

My take on all of this was that it was Reuters' finding that was probably truest, since Team Obama wasn't changing their strategy. Based on their behavior, I deduced that their own tracking was showing it working. And today Greg Sargent points to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll [pdf] that suggests the same thing. It finds that Obama leads Romney 49%-43%, that Romney's favorables are underwater at 35% favorable to 40% unfavorable, that 52% say they don’t identify with Romney’s "background and set of values," and "43 percent say they’ve seen, heard, or read something in the past few weeks that gives them a more negative impression of Romney."

CONTINUE TO POST>>

The Robotic Candidate Blows a Gasket

Yesterday, the rightwing National Review made what was probably (from their perspective, at least) a bad call. They bought the Romney line that the only reason Team Obama wants more tax returns released is so they can find stuff to make a big deal over. "The Obama people keep on wanting more and more and more," Romney has explained. "More things to pick through, more things for their opposition research to try make a mountain out of and to distort and to be dishonest about."

"Let them go fish," said the editorial board, ignoring the very obvious.

And the very obvious is that the argument's basically Romney admitting that there's stuff in there to make a big deal over. It's not like Mitt's completely in the dark over what's in his tax returns; when Romney says the Obama campaign just wants dirt, he's basically admitting that he's not releasing his tax returns because there's dirt in there.

Which is why Team Romney is desperate to change the subject -- and why they're failing to do just that. The very obvious is just as very obvious to the press as it is to me. Romney's hiding something and they want to know what it is. In fact, they want to know so very badly that they're finally giving the "veepstakes" the attention it deserves -- i.e., not a whole lot. And this while Romney's chumming the waters with running mate rumors. When that shiny bauble can't get the media's attention, your messaging apparatus is spiraling wildly out of control.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Romney Finally Being Vetted

You wouldn't have gone wrong predicting that, in the presidential race, someone would be in trouble this week. With congress settling back in from recess, the American political world is in what would be a newsless period -- and newsless periods cannot be allowed in a 24/7 news world. Someone was going to be in trouble this week, because the news cycle demands it.

Not that this makes it impossible that any political story coming out this week is a "real" story. If you had some substantial opposition research, now would be an excellent time to bring it out -- which means that both campaigns should have expected something from the other. And it's clear, in this week, that one side did not. Now Mitt Romney is on the defensive against accusations of shipping jobs overseas -- accusations that hinge on the timing of his departure from Bain Capital. And, with the Boston Globe reporting that Mitt was CEO of Bain during a critical period, the Romney campaign is in damage control mode.

Now Harry Reid is saying that Romney wouldn't survive a senate confirmation hearing for any position, because of his Bain record, combined with his secrecy about his tax records. "He not only couldn’t be confirmed as a Cabinet secretary, he couldn’t be confirmed as a dog catcher, because a dog catcher — you’re at least going to want to look at his income tax returns," Reid said yesterday. "And the long report that we have in the Boston Globe today indicates that, as one of his own employees said, it doesn’t make sense. He said he left Bain to go to the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and stopped any association with Bain. But his SEC filings indicated that he was chief executive officer, sole stockholder, and ran the corporation for at least 3 more years. And that’s why people who say there’s been advertisements where businesses were closed, people laid off — and he says oh I wasn’t there, I left in 1999. As his own operative said, it doesn’t make sense. And it doesn’t."

Friday the 13th came early for Team Romney -- why didn't they see it coming?

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Poll: Romney's Wealth Not an Asset

Mitt Romney's got a little bit of a problem -- he's crazy-rich. Normally, this would be the opposite of a problem, but this is an election year. In fact, this election year -- where Americans are still struggling to recover from rich people driving the economy off a cliff -- it's even more of a problem. In fact, polling shows that almost no one sees Romney's wealth as a positive.

Gallup:

Three-quarters of registered voters say the fact that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is worth more than $200 million makes no difference to their likelihood of voting for him. However, 20% of voters, mostly Democrats and independents, say Romney's wealth makes them less likely to vote for him, while 4% say it makes them more likely...

The Obama campaign has targeted Romney's wealth in recent weeks, stressing his net worth and how he earned it as head of Bain Capital, where he has invested it, and the fact that he has not released all of his tax returns from the last decade. Obama's campaign is apparently using Romney's wealth in its efforts to convince voters that Romney is not as well-equipped as Obama to understand the problems and needs of middle- and lower-class Americans. The Romney campaign has pushed back, stressing that voters are more interested in fixing the economy than in the candidates' personal financial situations.

Gallup's July 9-10 results show that most Americans say Romney's wealth does not matter. Those who say it does make a difference tilt five to one toward saying it makes them less likely, rather than more likely, to vote for him for president.

Since only 4% see it as a positive and 20% see it as a negative, the fact that most don't care either way is pretty much irrelevant, math-wise. Romney loses vastly more votes than he gains when his wealth is brought up (in fact, he gains almost none) and, in what's expected to be a tight election, that may be enough to cost him the presidency right there.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Blaming the Treatment for the Disease

Bass-ackward reasoning 101: Imagine a patient with kidney disease. This patient has be treated with dialysis regularly or the blood toxins normally filtered out by the kidneys will eventually kill him. It's not cheap, but it's necessary. Everyone knows that the solution to this problem is a kidney transplant. But a group of quacks -- without any real research at all -- insist that the problem isn't the failing kidneys, the problem is the dialysis. Stop giving the patient the treatment and they'll recover.

I bring this up to draw a parallel. After Mitt Romney said he wasn't "concerned about the very poor," head wingnut and US Senator Jim DeMint suggested a better way of putting it -- the dialysis is the problem, not the disease.

Roll Call:

DeMint said that portion of Romney’s comments also need to be reframed. While Democrats have been using Romney’s comments to argue he is callous toward the poor, conservatives have expressed concern that the former governor might be OK with having Americans who are dependent on government-subsidized social programs.

“He needs to address it,” DeMint told Roll Call. “Because I know he does care about the poor. But I think he was trying to make a case that they’re taken care of. But, in fact, I would say I’m worried about the poor because many are trapped in dependency, they need a good job; they don’t need to be on social welfare programs. I think he needs to turn that around because — the middle class is key, and we have to focus on that. And, really, the problem with the middle class is not successful people, it’s politicians — but the key to making our country successful it to get everyone on that economic ladder.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

Mitt's Poverty Level Tax Rate

Nothing on Earth invites speculation from the punditry more than ignorance. Pundits get paid to do two things; to make predictions and to know things you don't. "I don't know" is probably written on some stone tablet of Forbidden Phrases somewhere. As a result, people take blind stabs at issues they couldn't possibly know anything about. One of those issues has been Mitt Romney's tax returns. Why was he reluctant to release them?

One of the blind stabs was that maybe Mittens didn't pay the required 10% tithe to the Church of Latter Day Saints. Score one for blind stabs -- he probably hasn't. "Mr. Romney reported $21.7 million in income [for 2010]," Wall Street Journal reports. "He paid $3 million in federal taxes, slightly more than the $2.98 million he made in charitable donations. At least $1.5 million of his charitable donations went to the Mormon Church." $21.7 million, $1.5 million tithe. You do the math. Mitt's shorting his church a bit.

But while that figure might get the attention of a certain Tabernacle in a certain Utah city, it's not what's drawing everyone else's. Our attention is drawn to the fact that Romney's tax bill adds up to somewhat less than even the absurdly low 15% estimate Romney gave in South Carolina. Specifically, 13.9%. You could argue that a little more than one percent difference amounts to splitting hairs, but when it's a percentage of a number like $21.7 million, we're talking about some pretty big and split-worthy hairs. It's the difference between the $3,016,300 Romney assumedly paid and $3,255,000 15% would've had him paying. You could feed and house a family on his rounding error.

CONTINUE TO POST>>

The Bain of the GOP's Existence

The next time someone tells you, "I'm a capitalist," go ahead and answer, "No, you're not." You'd just be playing the odds. A capitalist is defined as "A wealthy person who uses money to invest in trade and industry for profit in accordance with the principles of capitalism." In other words, probably not you or the person you're talking to. "Capitalist" is synonymous with "financier."

Also, notice the term "job creation" isn't anywhere in the definition. People don't invest to create jobs, they invest to make money. In fact, whether any jobs are created by the investment is entirely beside the point. In many cases, jobs are lost. The people Republicans hold up as the high-minded "job creators" not only aren't interested in creating jobs, but they'd really rather not. When you're maximizing profits, you want as few employees as possible. After all, you're in the business of writing your own paycheck, not someone else's.

When it comes to what Republicans call "job creation," they'd rather you didn't see how the sausage is made. Because when you get right down to it, it looks pretty heartless. If hiring someone means you'll make money, you'll hire someone -- and if firing someone means you'll make money, they're out. The "job creators" have been doing one helluva lot more firing than hiring lately, which makes the GOP's favored term for capitalists a lie. After all, one would assume that a "job creator" actually would get around to creating some jobs. Lately, they've been acting as "job destroyers."

Which brings us to a guy named Willard "Mitt" Romney, son of wealth, former vulture capitalist and professional job destroyer. Remember the villain in all those movies -- you know, the ones where there's a hostile takeover and rich corporate-type wants to sell off all the company's assets and fire everyone? Yeah, those movies. That's Mitt Romney, CEO of Bain Capital. He's that guy.

CONTINUE TO POST>>