Mitt Romney campaign muddies defense by calling Bain record 'fair game'

Mitt Romney shows off some of the jobs cash created at Bain Capital For months now, Mitt Romney has been saying that anytime someone questions his record as CEO of Bain Capital, they are guilty of attacking the free enterprise system itself ... but now one of his campaign's top surrogates is saying that exploring Romney's Bain record is "fair game."

"I think the Bain record as a whole is fair game, and what you have to do is do an honest evaluation," said Sununu, an adviser to the GOP presidential candidate, on a conference call hosted by the Romney campaign.

"The Bain record is about 80 percent, they were able to save jobs at companies, and 20 percent, when they invested in companies that were in such bad shape, they weren't able to save those jobs," Sununu said. "That's a good batting average in the private sector business, private equity business."

Sununu's standard might seem like "common sense," but it's actually nonsense. For starters, the 80 percent figure doesn't mean that in 80 percent of cases, Bain investments led to job growth. AP's Steve Peoples explains:

A Bain spokesman also said "revenues grew in 80 percent of the more than 350 companies in which we have invested," which does not necessarily mean that the companies' bottom lines or job numbers improved.

But even if the real percentage of investments that led to jobs growth actually were 80 percent, it wouldn't change the underlying issue: that the premise of Mitt Romney's candidacy is flawed.

In Mitt Romney's own words, his Bain record is his core qualification. "I am running for president because I have spent my life in the private sector," he said last year, launching his campaign. As we can see now, Romney made a huge error defining his campaign in those terms. Sure, he gets credited with having been a successful private equity businessman, but the nation isn't looking for a private equity CEO to be commander-in-chief. Never before in American history have we elected a corporate titan to the presidency and there's no reason to think we are going to do it now.

As President Obama said yesterday, that's not a knock on CEOs'it's just that CEOs have different objectives than the president, and different skills to achieve those objectives. As much as I like Warren Buffett and liked Steve Jobs, I wouldn't want either of them in the Oval Office, and I sure as hell wouldn't want President Obama running Apple or Berkshire Hathaway.

And one thing we know about Mitt Romney is that he's no Steve Jobs and he's no Warren Buffett.