Romney's Qualifications

I was planning to write a post about Romney's claim that he is more qualified to be president because of his business experience. The point was going to be that Romney's time as governor was better experience than his time at Bain Capital, especially because the government does not engage in private equity. Of course Romney doesn't want to talk about his time as governor because it would remind his base of a time when he was far less conservative.

But I never got around to writing that post, and good thing. Ezra Klein wrote a much better post on what Romney should have learned at Bain Capital to make him a better presidential candidate.

“I know how business works,” Romney likes to say. “I know why jobs come and why they go.” That’s overstating the case. But while Romney’s perspective at Bain was biased toward creating short-term profits rather than creating value or employment, it was a look at the ferocity of modern, global, financialized capitalism, and Romney surely recognizes its realities in a way many of us don’t.

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What he could have learned from that experience is that, just as creative destruction is important for moving an economy forward, a safety net is important for catching those who are left behind. As head of Bain, Romney fired a lot of workers who were perfectly good at their jobs, who were committed to their companies, who had families they needed to support. That was his job as head of a private-equity giant. But his job as president of the United States would also be to look out for those workers.

Klein goes on to say that Romney's plans do not help people caught up in creative destruction and therefore he didn't learn the right lessons from Bain Capital.

Klein's post is great - and you should read the whole thing because it really gets at the Bain Capital issue well. And yet it doesn't actually tell us anything new about Romney or the Republican Party.

Romney and the Republicans have shown, through the issues they focus on and the positions they choose, that they are exclusively concerned about the rich. They talk all about tax cuts - for everyone, but they won't agree unless the wealthy are included - and removing regulatory burdens.

But they have not demonstrated any support for the unemployed. They complain that benefits are too generous, including unemployment insurance. They have no plan to provide universal health care. And they have no urgency in bringing unemployment down, especially if it means the possibility of higher inflation.

So yes, Romney should have learned from Bain Capital about the things that face middle income and lower income households. But he had many opportunities to do that. He could have learned how hard getting through college can be by realizing how comparatively easy it was using his trust fund. But he didn't. And this says something about him and who he sympathizes with.