Romney’s millions—more on the equity-sector candidate from the NYT

October 1, 2007 in 2008, analysis, campaign finance, campaign management, conservatism, election, election 2008, GOP, mitt romney, republicans, romney, the dark soul of Mitt Romney
Tags: Bain & Company, Bain Capital, Bill Bain, capital, capitalism, connections, David D. Kirkpatrick, economy, equity-sector, NYT, post-capitalism, Romney's biography, Romney's origins, wealth

“WASHINGTON, June 3 — Mitt Romney owes his nearly $350 million fortune and his political career to a delicate negotiation with his boss in the summer of 1983,” writes the estimable David D. Kirkpatrick in a NTY release titled Romney’s Fortunes Tied to Business Riches

His boss, Bill Bain, founder of the Boston consulting firm Bain & Company, called Mr. Romney into his corner office to say that the partners had picked him to start an investment fund to cash in on the huge gains their clients were making in the stock market.

To Mr. Bain’s surprise, Mr. Romney, then 36, seemed wary. He worried about giving up his comfortable salary for a venture that might fail and, later, that investing would pose conflicts for a consulting firm.

Mr. Bain had been determined not to cede any control of the investment fund, but over months of talks Mr. Romney persuaded him to do just that. Mr. Romney emerged as head of an independent sister company, Bain Capital. And Mr. Bain protected him financially while assuming the most risk.

Two decades later, Bain Capital is one of the nation’s five largest private equity firms, and Mr. Romney, who left its management eight years ago, is making his success there a cornerstone of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Citing his business experience, he urges voters to reject “lifetime politicians” who “have never run a corner store, let alone the largest enterprise in the world.”

Mr. Romney, though, never ran a corner store or a traditional business. Instead, he excelled as a deal maker, a buyer and seller of companies, a master at the art of persuasion that he demonstrated in the talks that led to the forming of Bain Capital.

“Mitt ran a private equity firm, not a cement company,” said Eric A. Kriss, a former Bain Capital partner. “He was not a businessman in the sense of running a company,” Mr. Kriss said, adding, “He was a great presenter, a great spokesman and a great salesman.”

Supporters of Mr. Romney argue that those skills also equip him for public office, whether as governor of Massachusetts, which he was for four years, or as president … more

We have harped upon this string for weeks and weeks—finally the media is catching up. Romney is not a business person as he claims, at least not in any conventional sense. He is an equity-sector non-capitalist, one of the new ruling class in an era that Drucker once referred to as “pension-fund socialism,” the era of vast pools of spare money larger than any capitalist of the so-called capitalist era could ever imagine, pools of money alienated from their “owners” (fund investors, pensioners) and managed by well-connected professional elites, e.g. Willard Milton Romney. (This is why Drucker referred to this era as “post-capitalist.”) For more on this theme, see:

Romney and private equity: the new ruling class

yours &c.
dr. g.d.

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