Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Does Romney care about ordinary people?

Visual source: Newseum

Mitt Romney has a people problem. Not just a "corporations are people, my friend" type of people problem, but a problem with a narrative that's dogged him since day 1 of the general election. Does Romney care about ordinary people? The type of people who don't have sports team owners as friends. The type of people who struggle to balance a family budget. You know, most of America.

Bain Capital is taking a toll on Romney's numbers (read Markos's analysis here). Why? Carter Eskew at The Washington Post looks at the central question raised by highlighting Mitt Romney's tenure at the job-sucking vampire firm Bain Capital:

even some Republicans are speculating that Obama's attacks on Romney's record at Bain are having a negative impact. That's not surprising, and it is an important political development. The Bain story has never been about private equity or the importance and benefit of private capital pools more generally. Few voters understand that world and fewer care. Rather, it is a story about Romney's version of capitalism, which is to make money for shareholders and himself no matter what.

As Obama noted, the president's job is different. Here, you not only have to encourage private investment, but shepherd public investment as well. And, more relevant to the Bain story, you have to deal with the castaways from modern capitalism: those who are left behind when their jobs are outsourced, eliminated or down-sized. All those Bain ads leave a lingering and devastating question: Does Mitt Romney see or care about these people?

Josh Marshall on why Bain is back:

'Private equity' is a weird phrase. Most people have no idea what it does or doesn't mean. And the Romney campaign through it's surrogates was able to hit its opponents with something like 'Hey, it's poor form to be going all Nation magaziney and pretending that private equity isn't awesome!'

And within that community, it worked. Thus Cory Booker, Bill Clinton, and a lot of other Democrats. 'Private equity' means a lot of different things. My own sense is that some parts of it are incredibly destructive while others create efficient allocations of capital. But who cares what I think? Wherever you come down on that question there's simply no question that private equity is at the tip of the the spear of creative destruction in our society. So in a country where everybody gets to vote, it's sort of crazy to think criticizing something like that would somehow be beyond the pale like attacking the Pope or crapping on motherhood and apple pie. But there it was.

'Outsourcing' though and 'Offshoring' ' these are just more graspable words, more concrete concepts. Everybody understands them. Everybody knows what they mean. I'm pretty sure the Romney campaign wants to say something like, 'C'mon, our whole economy today is based on stuff like this and we all know it and everybody accepts it so don't pretend otherwise.' But they can't. And what really got them all boxed up was when they got themselves into this ridiculous debate over whether Mitt's an 'outsourcer' or an 'offershorer'. As I said Monday, that's an argument you lose by winning. Or lose by losing. Whichever way, you lose.

Matthew Yglesias at Slate:

All that said, while I'm happy to defend the layoff business as a legitimate and even useful element of a dynamic modern economy, I'm sure glad it's not my job. Normal people, if put in a position where layoffs are necessary, find them to be emotionally arduous in the extreme. I wouldn't want to be the guy who takes over companies and shuts down operations for a living, and I don't think I'd want to be friends with that guy. It seems like a job only an emotionally unbalanced jerk would want, hence Up in the Air. A major innovator such as Apple does end up causing layoffs at rival firms. But no one at Apple ever has to feel responsible for those layoffs. To walk into a dying factory or doomed corporate office and actually fire people, you need to be pretty callous.

So one question is simply whether that's the kind of disposition people want in a president. Maybe it is. Maybe Obama's too soft to make the tough calls? But maybe market economy is a cold and unfeeling place full of Mitt Romneys and we want a public sector driven by compassion to temper it. After all, not everyone is as fortunate in business as Mitt Romney.

More recently it occurs to me that a third point about launching attacks on Bain is to challenge Romney to say a bit more clearly what it is about his business experience that qualifies him to be president. He says that this background is important, but he rarely explains exactly why. To the extent that Romney can persuade people that Bain's success was mostly about taking existing institutions and running them better, that makes perfect sense. To the extent that Obama can persuade people that actually leverage buyout profits mostly come through the sort of tactics detailed by Andrei Shleifer and Lawrence Summers in "Breach of Trust in Hostile Takeovers" (basically screwing people over by finding legal ways to break tacit agreements) then it makes less sense.

Robert Reich at The Christian Science Monitor:

[T]he real issue here isn't Bain's betting record. It's that Romney's Bain is part of the same system as Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan Chase, Jon Corzine's MF Global and Lloyd Blankfein's Goldman Sachs'a system that has turned much of the economy into a betting parlor that nearly imploded in 2008, destroying millions of jobs and devastating household incomes. The winners in this system are top Wall Street executives and traders, private-equity managers and hedge-fund moguls, 'and the losers are most of the rest of us. The system is largely responsible for the greatest concentration of the nation's income and wealth at the very top since the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, with the richest 400 Americans owning as much as the bottom 150 million put together. And these multimillionaires and billionaires are now actively buying the 2012 election'and with it, American democracy.

The biggest players in this system have, like Romney, made their profits placing big bets with other people's money. If the bets go well, the players make out like bandits. If they go badly, the burden lands on average workers and taxpayers.

Tim Conners writes about layoffs in Freeport:

Our community has been slapped in the face again.  Big business has not only wiped its feet all over our welcome mat.....they have poured gasoline on it and torched it.  As you have been reading in the Journal Standard, 170 workers of Honeywell/Sensata/Bain from Freeport will have their jobs sent to China.  Friends, family members, strangers but more importantly, community members....our community members.

Recently, it was revealed that Sensata is owned by Bain Capital, the private equity firm that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney helped start.  Interesting, isn't this the same man who has proclaimed throughout the country that we need to keep jobs in America.  O.K., now I'm really hot.  It is time that we bring Mitt Romney to Freeport.

We have him stand behind a podium at the Krape Park Bandshell and have him look us square in the eye and tell us, why this is happening.  I am tired of our town accepting this treatment and I want us to stand up for ourselves....not just for our 170 community members but for all of the communities ripped apart because of their greed.  I am tired of Freeport having its hands tied behind its back and getting slapped in the face left and right, and just taking it.