Whether Romney’s business dealings were legitimate or not, we have an interest in knowing exactly what they were and whether they represent the right temperament and experience necessary for a president. So far, it doesn’t sound like it. It sounds like he is someone who loves governing from the top-down, moving the pieces all around the board with little regard or thought for all the little people that get crushed in the process.
Again, it may have been necessary for the bottom line to cut those people off, but someone who is so comfortable doing that doesn’t seem cut out to govern the country. If Romney acted as President like he did in business, he would be a dictatorial socialist, creating and controlling big government machines to fulfill his own ends but not caring much about how the average citizen fared under the iron boot of his system. This also explains why he did govern as a socialist so comfortably in Massachusetts.
There is probably a reason we don’t have a tradition of big businessmen serving in government. Just look at one of our most recent examples, Jon Corzine, to see how well that worked out. These big businessmen seem to be control freaks who think they know better than the rest of us and are not sensitive to how their big decisions affect the little guy. Businesses are dictatorships built around a hierarchy. They aren’t democracies and their leaders aren’t used to being answerable to the will of all the little people living under them.
I imagine that most of what Bain Capital was doing was legitimate—some may not like it, but there is a need for firms who specialize in clearing out financial debris, reconsolidating failing businesses, etc. (vultures, as it were).
A more useful point of attack against Romney, would be to assault the narrative of him being a so-called entrepreneurial businessman with his finger on the pulse of the “real economy”—he isn’t that: he’s just been a successful finance guy who’s headed an investment firm. Which is a very different kind of acumen, and it’s questionable how appropriate that kind of acumen will be for creating jobs.