Scott Rasmussen: “McCain actually holds a slight lead over Romney among voters who name the economy as the top issue”—Nutting of MarketWatch: “Seven of 10 Republicans say the best thing the government can do to help the economy is get out of the way, which is more McCain’s view than Romney’s”

January 29, 2008 in 2008, analysis, argument, campaign communications, campaign management, conservatism, election 2008, GOP, incompetence, media, mitt romney, polls, republicans, rhetoric, romney, strategy, stupidity, the dark soul of Mitt Romney, triumph of unreason
Tags: Bain Capital, capital, capitalism, duplicity, economy, equity-sector, Florida, jobs, lies, marketwatch, rex nutting, scott rasmussen, Sen. John McCain

[…] “It’s the perfect opportunity for a Wall Street Republican to make the case that what the country needs now is good business mind, not a former war hero,” writes Rex Nutting, Washington bureau chief of MarketWatch, in a MarketWatch article titled Romney running for tycoon in chief; Commentary: Will business background be a plus?

Unfortunately for Romney, that appeal isn’t working in the Republican primaries.

Polls show that national security concerns continue to rank much higher among Republican voters, even if worries about the economy are growing. According to the Rasmussen Poll, Republican voters in Florida would rather pick a commander in chief than a chief executive for the U.S. economy.

Romney’s support has soared over the past two weeks, especially in Florida. He’s tied with Sen. John McCain in the latest polls ahead of Tuesday’s vote. But the Romney surge isn’t related to the bad news about the economy; rather, he’s picking up conservative voters stranded by Fred Thompson’s withdrawal from the race and Huckabee’s partial pullback from Florida.

Romney leads McCain among conservative voters, and he’s hoping that his message of economic competence could gain him support among voters who see themselves as moderates, where McCain holds a sizable lead.

Romney has been going directly after McCain, his chief rival for the nomination, accusing him of being out of touch on the economy. He has mocked McCain for saying “economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.”

McCain has fired back, saying that while Romney was making millions and working for “profit,” he was serving “patriotism.”

So far, the economic themes haven’t been registering for Romney.

According to pollster Scott Rasmussen, “McCain actually holds a slight lead over Romney among voters who name the economy as the top issue.” Seven of 10 Republicans say the best thing the government can do to help the economy is get out of the way, which is more McCain’s view than Romney’s.

Maybe Romney understands the economy, but it looks as if it’s McCain who understands Republicans.

If Romney can get past McCain and win the nomination, he’ll try to persuade independents and hesitant Democrats that his business background qualifies him to be president.

But if he does make it past the convention, it’ll be an uphill struggle to run as a tycoon after the mess Wall Street has made of the economy, with its overhyped dotcoms, its phony accounting, its bloated bonuses, and its toxic mortgages […]

The emphases are ours, all ours.

We heartily concur. See:

• Gavin: “Throughout his 15-year career at Bain Capital, which bought, sold, and merged dozens of companies, Romney had other chances to fight to save jobs, but didn’t—His ultimate responsibility was to make money for Bain’s investors, former partners said.”
• Flaherty: “Layoffs are a common result of private equity takeovers, with [Romney’s] Bain Capital no exception”
• Romney in FL wants credit for being a major player in the financial services sector—at the very moment that that sector is crashing and taking the US economy down with it

yours &c.
dr. g.d.

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Romney in FL wants credit for being a major player in the financial services sector—at the very moment that that sector is crashing and taking the US economy down with it

January 22, 2008 in 2008, analysis, argument, campaign communications, campaign communiques, campaign management, conservatism, election 2008, GOP, media, mitt romney, policy, republicans, rhetoric, romney, strategy, the dark soul of Mitt Romney, triumph of unreason
Tags: Bain Capital, capitalism, duplicity, equity-sector, ideological cross-dresser, jason szep, lies, lori santos, reuters

[…] “The former Massachusetts governor, who made a fortune as a venture capitalist before entering politics, said he saw a worrying trend in growing numbers of U.S. banks seeking capital offshore following a blowout in subprime mortgages,” writes Jason Szep with editing by Lori Santos, in a reuters.com release titled Romney warns of distressed markets

He stopped short of predicting some banks would face the risk of insolvency. But in a speech earlier to Florida’s Jewish Republican community he said he had been warned of such a crisis.

“We were talking about the credit crisis and how bad the credit crisis was and how to make sure the credit crunch is not spread, and someone sent a message back that said the credit crisis is so 2007 — 2008 is a solvency crisis,” he said.

“And that’s obviously a very fearful perspective and hopefully one that does not rear its ugly head in reality. But people are talking about institutions having difficulty maintaining their level of capital,” he added.

Stocks tumbled at the open on Tuesday, joining a global equity rout on fears of a U.S. recession. Investors dumped stocks despite the Federal Reserve’s slashing benchmark interest rates by 75 basis points in a surprise decision.

Romney is in a close four-way race in Florida where the primary on January 29 is the next test in the state-by-state battles to determine the Republican and Democratic candidates who will square off in November’s presidential election.

The multimillionaire former venture capitalist has retooled his campaign to emphasize his nearly 25 years of business experience that includes founding Bain Capital LLC, a successful Boston-based private-equity firm, in 1984 […]

Yes. More on Romney’s Bain Capital:

Romney’s “Bain Capital is partnering with China’s Huawei Technologies in a buyout of 3Com, the U.S. company that provides the technology that protects Pentagon computers from Chinese hackers”—is this the economic policy we can expect from Romney?—answer: yes.

And more on Romney’s relationship to the global crash:

Samuelson: “it is becoming clear that capitalism’s most dangerous enemies are capitalists”—our conclusion: capitalists like Romney

yours &c.
dr. g.d.

Romney’s “Bain Capital is partnering with China’s Huawei Technologies in a buyout of 3Com, the U.S. company that provides the technology that protects Pentagon computers from Chinese hackers”—is this the economic policy we can expect from Romney?—answer: yes.

January 16, 2008 in 2008, analysis, argument, conservatism, election 2008, GOP, mitt romney, republicans, rhetoric, romney, strategy, the dark soul of Mitt Romney, triumph of unreason
Tags: Bain Capital, capitalism, gov. mike huckabee, ideological cross-dresser, ideology, lies, new critique, Pat Buchanan, populism, post-capitalism, realclearpolitics.com, sen. john mccmain, subprime nation, theory

[…] “America, to pay her bills, has begun to sell herself to the world,” argues Pat Buchanan in an article titled Subprime Nation

Its balance sheet gutted by the subprime mortgage crisis, Citicorp got a $7.5 billion injection from Abu Dhabi and is now fishing for $1 billion from Kuwait and $9 billion from China. Beijing has put $5 billion into Morgan Stanley and bought heavily into Barclays Bank.

Merrill-Lynch, ravaged by subprime mortgage losses, sold part of itself to Singapore for $7.5 billion and is seeking another $3 billion to $4 billion from the Arabs. Swiss-based UBS, taking a near $15 billion write-down in subprime mortgages, has gotten an infusion of $10 billion from Singapore.

[Willard Miton Romney’s] Bain Capital is partnering with China’s Huawei Technologies in a buyout of 3Com, the U.S. company that provides the technology that protects Pentagon computers from Chinese hackers.

This self-indulgent generation has borrowed itself into unpayable debt. Now the folks from whom we borrowed to buy all that oil and all those cars, electronics and clothes are coming to buy the country we inherited. We are prodigal sons, and the day of reckoning approaches […]

The word financial system is in crisis. Romney, the equity sector candidate, has nothing to say about it.

Romney utterly silent on world financial crisis—we, for one, are grateful for this oversight

Only one candidate—possibly two—speaks clearly and compellingly on the problems that issue from the new capitalism

• Huckabee contra the inequities and inequalities of the financial services industry; is Huckabee sending signals to the Romneys?
• Medved: “[Gov. Huckabee’s] powerful appeal to females, the young and the poor make him a different kind of Republican—[one] who connects with voting blocs the GOP needs to win back—[Gov Huckabee is] hardly the one-dimensional religious candidate of media caricature”
• Brooks: “Romney represents what’s left of Republicanism 1.0. Huckabee and McCain represent half-formed iterations of Republicanism 2.0″

The populism of Gov. Huckabee—and to a lesser degree, Sen. McCain—reduces to a class critique consistent with the conservative principles as we understand them. The premises are these:

(1) Conservatism tolerates—even celebrates—natural hierarchies, e.g. some runners run more swiftly, some businesses profit more than others, some people amass more wealth than others, others are wiser than others etc.

(2) Conservatism tolerates—even celebrates—blind elites, i.e. gate keepers who rule on grounds of merit, examples may include universities, military formations, professional societies, corporate hierarchies, trade unions, craft guilds.

(3) Hence: conservatism in the era of the nation state tends to favor civil society and human commerce as relatively autonomous zones where natural hierarchies and blind elites may develop according to their own inner logic, their own rules.

(4) Here is the problem: the new capitalism,represented by the equity sector—vast pools of spare money, pension funds etc., managed not by owners but by a technically adept professional class with interests of their own—organizes itself according to different rules. When e.g. pension funds fail, the problem is instantly national and political and can cascade through an entire economy. Pension funds and other equity funds command capital reserves far in excess of other market actors.

Say a capital fund like Romney’s Bain Capital owns a stake in a national retailer. Say the retailer fails to perform. Whether the retailer is allowed to fail, whether the retailer is allowed to persist until market conditions change, or whether the retailer is “turned-around” by e.g. “re-engineering,” purging the management, downsizing, out-sourcing etc.—these are all reduced to technical questions. In other words, in the era of owner-less capital, competition and innovation take on a different characters—what we are confronted with, suddenly, is the antithesis of capitalism—what we are confronted with is a de facto planned economy in which profits are privatized, and costs—in the form of crashes and failures—are socialized. In other words, we don’t get a say in the planning. But when things fail it is we—pensioners, taxpayers—who get to pay for it.

“Pension fund socialism,” is what Peter Drucker called it in the 1970s when he predicted its rise. Well, it’s here.

(5) Further, economic development in general, productive capacities in particular, are more generalized globally. The US economy’s productivity relative to the rest of the world is in steep decline. The cost of energy has also increased precipitously; the entire post-war boom was largely an artifact of cheap energy, an enormous subsidy that we increasingly no longer enjoy. When energy-transfer systems or social systems experience supply shocks or the marginal returns on their investments begin to diminish, they begin to differentiate; their hierarchies begin to steepen. The rich become richer and the poor become poorer, to use a tired cliche. The rise of the equity sector is a part of this socio-material-historical process.

(6) Hence: neo-populism, and neo-populist proposals as articulated by Gov. Huckabee and Sen. McCain. Their critique is class as opposed to market or system based. Note that Sen. McCain in MI argued that the jobs lost to US industry were lost forever. What was required was investment in worker retraining and newer, lighter and more agile industries consonant with the historical moment. Also: Sen. McCain opposed Pres. Bush the younger’s tax cuts as he believed they benefited the rich etc.

Populism and class criticism in general is anathema to the Reagan coalition assumption about how productivity generalizes itself throughout a system. Allow the most disposed to do so to prosper as freely as possible—those who work hard, those who lead or innovate, those who can attract, organize, and develop income-producing capital—and everyone prospers as the newly developed wealth distributes itself throughout an economy, is the argument.

But what if the era itself no longer supports capital formation as construed classically? What if the new capitalists—or new non-capitalists, as they no longer own but only dispose of capital owned more generally—are capitalists like the steward capitalists of Bain Capital? For the capitalists of the industrial era the primary unit of production of circulation was the commodity, and everything got commodified—time and space itself got commodified. For the new non-capitalist the primary unit of production and circulation is the security, and everything is getting securitized.

Take, for example, mortgages, especially subprime mortgages. What drove so much cash into the mortgage markets were the banks, capital funds, pension funds etc., trading in the new mortgage-backed securities.

Politics and political life is a lagging sector. The sad truth is that no one yet knows what to make of these developments. Gov. Huckabee and Sen. McCain represent an intuitive and under-theorized response that hardly rises to the dignity of a knee-jerk reaction to the perception of great danger. But it is a response. And it is a start.

Here is what we believe is most perverse. Romney, after months of savaging Gov. Huckabee’s views and opinions on the economy, suddenly becomes Gov. Huckabee in MI. Romney becomes a populist. Suddenly this super-rich non-capitalist sides with the oppressed against entrenched powers in Washington, a city that Romney says “is broken.” But just as Romney’s alleged, ingenue, and now abandoned conservatism was always clumsy and caricatured, so too is his atavistic fantasy-populism. See:

candidate endorsed by the National Review, Romney, suddenly veers hard left, argues that Washington must subsidize, become “partner” with, US automobile industry

yours &c.
dr. g.d.

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.