Romney and McCain: The GOP Frenemies' Club

Michael Corleone said to "keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." But what, pray tell, do we do with our frenemies? This is the awful election-year quandary of movement conservatives. And everything you need to know about our heartache can be summed up in one image: 2008 presidential election loser John McCain and Mitt Romney together on the campaign trail.

When they're together, they look like they're holding each other (and the rest of us) hostage. Their toxic chemistry makes seething, ex-newlyweds Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries look like Fred and Ginger. In New Hampshire last week, after Romney's Iowa caucus squeaker, an overly giddy McCain mocked his endorsee for his "landslide victory." Awkward.

Then in South Carolina on Friday, McCain mistakenly referred to Romney as "President Obama" -- as Romney and South Carolina GOP Gov. Nikki Haley rushed to correct the gaffe. Freudian slip? Senior moment? Sabotage? All of the above?

Of course, if you choose to pal around with a double-talking, big government barnacle, you get what you deserve.

McCain is the entrenched incumbent Arizona senator/war hero who lost to a neophyte, radical leftist community organizer from Chicago. The "straight-talk" GOP candidate flip-flopped on everything from illegal immigration to global warming to offshore drilling to closing Gitmo. He pandered to minority grievance-mongers and the liberal media. He proposed massive government interventions bigger than Obama's.

This Beltway fossil who now poses as a tea party hero proudly teamed with Big Government liberals Teddy Kennedy and Russ Feingold. He's the "maverick" who supported the $700 billion TARP bailout, the $25 billion auto bailout, the first $85 billion AIG bailout and a $300 billion mortgage bailout -- yet he now carps about "record deficits and debt."

A career politician for the past 30 years, McCain set the stage for the suicidal anti-capitalist rhetoric now polluting the GOP primary. Four years ago this month, during a GOP primary debate held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, it was McCain up on stage denigrating Romney's private-sector experience. Asked whether he thought Romney's record as CEO made him qualified to lead, McCain snarked: "I know how to lead. I led the largest squadron in the United States Navy. And I did it out of patriotism, not for profit."

Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman have all followed suit, bashing Romney's venture-capitalist past at Bain Capital with Occupy Wall Street-style zeal.

It's one thing to carefully dissect Romney's investments, as the Wall Street Journal did, and weigh his wins against his losses. (The paper found that "in total, Bain produced about $2.5 billion in gains for its investors in the 77 deals, on about $1.1 billion invested. Overall, Bain recorded roughly 50 percent to 80 percent annual gains in this period, which experts said was among the best track records for buyout firms in that era.")

It's quite another to shamelessly disparage those who work in private equities as immoral corporate raiders and avaricious job-killers, as the three aforementioned GOP Occupiers have done. If they keep it up, they'll soon be chaining themselves together with bike locks, performing "mic checks" and "down twinkles" at the next GOP debate.

Gingrich has pushed McCain's profit-bashing line the furthest. Backed by a super-PAC (the very campaign finance vehicle he was whining about last week) flush with $5 million from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the vendetta-driven former House speaker accused Romney and a "handful of rich people" of "looting" companies. Channeling left-wing propagandist Michael Moore, Gingrich railed that Bain "manipulate(d) the lives of thousands of other people." Gingrich -- who raked in millions consulting for the taxpayer-subsidized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac racket -- also served on the advisory board of private equities firm and leveraged buyout experts Forstmann Little.

Romney's chronic flip-flopping political career is teeming with reasons for grass-roots conservatives to oppose his nomination -- from his support for racial preferences and government funding of abortion, liberal judges, global warming enviro-nitwittery, TARP, auto bailouts, the Obama stimulus, gun control and, of course, the Massachusetts individual health insurance mandates that presaged Obamacare. But instead of focusing on his long political record of expedience, incompetent non-Romneys have borrowed from McCain's 2008 playbook and thrown wealth creators of all kinds who take risks in the private marketplace under the bus.

GREAT points by Malkin, as usual. bttt

Malkin: “It’s one thing to carefully dissect Romney’s investments, as the Wall Street Journal did -—http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204331304577140850713493694.html -—, and weigh his wins against his losses. ....It’s quite another to shamelessly disparage those who work in private equities as immoral corporate raiders and avaricious job-killers...”

But didn’t Bain deal in “junk bonds”?

If so, here’s the contrast:

Nov 24, 2011
Emmett Tyrrell
Forstmann, the Big-Hearted Prodigy
http://townhall.com/columnists/emmetttyrrell/2011/11/24/forstmann,_the_big-hearted_prodigy/page/full/

WASHINGTON On Sunday morning we lost a big-hearted prodigy: Teddy Forstmann, financier, political player, philanthropist (especially for the young and those in education) and a bit of an adventurer. I know I accompanied him on some and feared for my life. He was a member of the Board of Directors of The American Spectator in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Teddy died of brain cancer, and we shall miss him.

[........]

Teddy would not use junk bonds. That was, he would say, “funny money. It’s wampum.” Over lunch, he would try to explain it to me. He was famous for coining the phrase “barbarians at the gate.” It served as the title for Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s best-seller about the $25 billion deal for RJR Nabisco, which Forstmann bid on but lost to private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts.

Teddy had an eye for “the deal” but was also extremely well-read, athletic and civilized. He was a conservative too. He donated millions to the Republican Party, though his real interest was in education and the young. He teamed up with John T. Walton, son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, and donated millions to the Children’s Scholarship Fund. He was an advocate of voucher programs and charter schools.

Teddy also had a sense of humor. He created a rivalry with Henry Kravis from the battle for RJR Nabisco. Teddy prided himself on using subordinated debt. KKR used junk debt. Teddy lost, but in “Barbarians at the Gate,” Burrough and Helyar testify that Teddy “fervently believed junk bonds had perverted not only the LBO industry but Wall Street itself.” .....

[........]

Bain drip drip drip
Posted by William A. Jacobson Friday, January 6, 2012 at 4:34pm
http://legalinsurrection.com/2012/01/bain-drip-drip-drip/

It’s so frustrating, the failure of conservative media and Republican campaigns to vet Mitt Romney’s Bain days.

Instead of hiring cartoonists to turn Newt into Marvin the Martian, National Review should have been digging deep into the public filings, court filings, and the financial history of the companies Bain acquired and sold. You better believe there isn’t a court document or SEC filing which the Obama campaign hasn’t digitized and analyzed.

Maybe there is nothing damaging, but my gut tells me otherwise. That Romney inexplicably refuses to release his tax returns should have leading conservative pundits screaming warnings at the tops of their lungs; instead we get psycho-babble comparing Newt to Ahab seeking the Great White Mitt.

In Bain drip drip I noted a NY Times article about Romney’s post-Bain deal participation.

Now Reuters has a damaging story about how one of the companies bought by Bain left the feds to deal with underfunded pensions, Special report: Romney’s steel skeleton in the Bain closet:

The young men in business suits, gingerly picking their way among the millwrights, machinists and pipefitters at Kansas City’s Worldwide Grinding Systems steel mill….

Apparently they liked what they saw. Soon after, in October 1993, Bain Capital, co-founded by Mitt Romney, became majority shareholder in a steel mill that had been operating since 1888.

It was a gamble. The old mill, renamed GS Technologies, needed expensive updating, and demand for its products was susceptible to cycles in the mining industry and commodities markets.

Less than a decade later, the mill was padlocked and some 750 people lost their jobs. Workers were denied the severance pay and health insurance they’d been promised, and their pension benefits were cut by as much as $400 a month.

What’s more, a federal government insurance agency had to pony up $44 million to bail out the company’s underfunded pension plan. Nevertheless, Bain profited on the deal, receiving $12 million on its $8 million initial investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees.

Not illegal, part of that “creative destruction” thing. I get it. And I’m sure there is plenty of blame to go around. My concern is we’re only hearing about it in drips. You can be sure Team Obama is holding the good stuff back.

[....huge snip.....]

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