Romney business record a success

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Updated: February 14, 2012 10:12AM

The bitter tone of the campaign leading up to South Carolina’s primary on Jan. 21 gives the contest the feel of a last-gasp drive by a couple of opponents to stop by any means Mitt Romney from securing the Republican presidential nomination.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry have stooped to the kind of anti-free-market demagoguery characteristic of the left. They attacked Romney’s record with Bain Capital, a private equity firm, as “looting” and “vulture capitalism.” The blowback from conservative leading lights such as the National Review, the Club for Growth, and radio talk star Rush Limbaugh have Gingrich and Perry tempering and defending their attacks but not abandoning them.

Taken by surprise by anti-capitalism rhetoric from Republicans, Romney has been less than adroit in his response. Now his campaign is getting ready to roll out ads highlighting the companies Bain helped grow and offering testimonials from their employees about the jobs created. Gingrich and Perry may have done Romney a favor by forcing him to confront the Bain issue and articulate a response to it before President Barack Obama and his re-election team unleash their attacks.

Bain invested in startups and in companies in serious trouble. It had many more successes — household names like Staples, Sports Authority, Domino’s Pizza — than failures. Bain had failures because it was in a risky business — trying to turn around firms already in serious trouble. Steven N. Kaplan, of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, told the Wall Street Journal, “For every one that went bankrupt, they had one that was a screaming success. The overall effect was terrific performance” for Bain investors. Those include college endowments and public pension funds, meaning all sorts of ordinary Americans profited from Romney’s success.

Someone who knows how to successfully navigate the economy is exactly what the nation needs after Obama’s clueless policies.

“Overall, Bain Capital’s record was extraordinary, among the best of the business,” writes Steven Rattner in Politico. That name may ring a bell. Rattner is a former private equity executive who was the lead auto adviser to the Obama administration during the government bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. Then the government played a role not unlike Bain. It took over two failing businesses, put them into bankruptcy, and shed employees and dealerships. It wasn’t private capital at risk but taxpayer funds. Though Democrats like to tout the success of GM and Chrysler, the bailout cost taxpayers $14 billion.

What about the administration’s investment in green energy? The biggest flop was the half-billion-dollar failed bet on Solyndra. The result: the loss of 1,000 jobs.

And who knows how many jobs have vanished with the White House’s hostility to fossil fuels? More than 20,000 direct jobs — and maybe more than 100,000 supply and support workers — will be lost if Obama doesn’t reverse the decision preventing construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry Canadian oil to U.S. refineries on the Gulf coast.

According to the Institute for Energy Research, offshore lease sales have fallen more than $9.4 billion since Obama was sworn in. How many jobs did that kill?

A Democratic attack on Romney over his Bain record would only focus the debate on job creation — and that wouldn’t be good for Obama’s re-election hopes.