Mitt Romney 13.0: Bain is back

It's getting close to the end of the month, the RNC is right around the corner, and Mitt Romney is still trailing President Obama. So, naturally, the time has come for him to reinvent himself all over again, this time with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he once again touts his record at Bain Capital as his key qualification for the presidency.

Given that Mitt Romney spent the better part of May, June, and July denying that he had any responsibility for anything that happened at Bain, I'm thinking Mitt probably had some second thoughts about writing this. So with that in mind, here's the first three paragraphs of Mitt's article'along with what he was probably really thinking when he wrote it.

The back-to-school season is here, and as parents take their children to shop for school supplies, I suspect that many of them will be visiting a Staples store. [But I don't really care whether they do or don't, because Bain sold its stake in Staples way back in 1990.] I'm very familiar with those stores because Staples is one of many businesses we helped create and expand at Bain Capital, a firm that my colleagues and I built. [I know that Staples put a lot of small businesses out of work, but if you don't like creative destruction, then you're not an American. If you want to make money, get a real job, like I did.] The firm succeeded by growing and fixing companies. [Of course, we also made money when we invested in companies that failed. One of way of doing that was loading them up with debt so that we could pay ourselves millions in management fees before the companies went bankrupt.]

The lessons I learned over my 15 years at Bain Capital were valuable in helping me turn around the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. [For example, while I was at Bain I learned that if you had connections, you could get millions of dollars from the Federal government. We got $1.6 billion for the winter games!] They also helped me as governor of Massachusetts to turn a budget deficit into a surplus and reduce our unemployment rate to 4.7%. [Doesn't that sound much better than 47th in the nation in job creation? Or leaving the state with $2 billion in new debt?] The lessons from that time would help me as president to fix our economy, create jobs and get things done in Washington. [In other words, I'm going to build this joint.]

A broad message emerges from my Bain Capital days: A good idea is not enough for a business to succeed. It requires a talented team, a good business plan and capital to execute it. [I built the schools that educated my talented team and if you don't have the capital to execute your business plan, just ask your parents.] That was true of companies we helped start, like Staples and the Bright Horizons child-care provider, and several of the struggling companies we helped turn around, like the Brookstone retailer and the contact-lens maker Wesley Jessen. [My $2 million investment in Staples back in 1985 created 100,000 jobs today. My pledge as president is to make the Staples model America's model.]

Romney goes on to praise himself for having the wisdom to realize that the American steel industry was failing, leading him to invest in Steel Dynamics. He doesn't mention that Steel Dynamics was started with tens of millions in subsidies, nor does he explain why he also invested in one of the "old-technology" steel firms that he knew was failing. That firm, GST Steel, went bankrupty, but not before Romney loaded it up with debt, raided its pension, and cashed out with millions.

Romney also doesn't explain how his experience at Bain creating companies domiciled in the Caymans would help regular Americans, nor does he make the case for why his experience building an IRA with more than $100 million in it makes him the right guy to reform our broken tax code. I'm sure that Mitt Romney didn't want to revive those issues by bringing Bain back into the conversation. But he did.