Rick Santorum declines to hit Mitt Romney on Bain

Washington Post ^ | 01/09/2012 | Rosalind Helderman

[Qbert]

SALEM, N.H. — Former Republican senator Rick Santorum, who squeaked to within eight votes of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in last week’s Iowa caucuses, acknowledged Monday that a second-place finish for him in New Hampshire is unlikely.

[Snip]

Leaving the frozen event, Santorum also declined to take a shot at Romney over a remark earlier from the front-runner that he “likes to fire” workers who are not doing a good job.

“We try to hire good people, we try to keep them employed. If someone if obviously not performing their duty and their mission, obviously a business has a responsibility for the greater good of the business and the other employees to make sure that everybody there is pulling their weight,” Santorum said.

Asked whether Romney’s corporate takeover experience at Bain Capital would be a liability, Santorum said: “I’m not making it a liability. I believe in the private sector.”

At a later campaign stop at an Elk’s Lodge in Salem, Santorum rejected the idea, posed in a question from a voter, that his outspoken opposition to gay marriage might make him less electable than Romney against Obama.

Santorum’s rising numbers in New Hampshire appear to have begun to stall after he engaged in a back-and-forth with a college student on gay marriage.

“Everyone on the stage yesterday and the day before [at the Republican debates] has pretty much the same position I have on these issues,” Santorum said. “President Obama says he has the same position I have on gay marriage. The only difference between myself and any of them is that when someone asks me a question, I answer it.”

[annieokie]

""""I just want Romney taken out"""""

AMEN to that, anyway possible. Go Newt. Why should he be on the receiving end of ALL THEIR LIES? Bullies must be stopped one way or another.

[NVDave]

Bain is an issue that should be discussed, because Romney likes to point to it as his credential for knowing something about business, creating jobs and wealth. It is absolutely fair game.

The funny thing about Romney and Bain is this: Romney has been attacked on this issue before - in TWO prior campaigns.

And still, he and his flunkies don’t have the answers to the Bain issues and questions pre-prepared, ready to fire back at critics.

Why is that? Why is it that he has tailored his message on all manner of issues - from abortion, to health care, to gun control, etc... but he hasn’t formulated a response to critical remarks of his time at Bain?

[rhinohunter]

Perry is viewed as a joke outside of Texas

Believe me...Perry is viewed as a joke inside Texas too...

[meadsjn]

Santorum will end up endorsing Romney, just as Huckabee has done. They can’t help it. It’s a disease.

[meadsjn]

Why is that? ... he hasn’t formulated a response to critical remarks of his time at Bain?

Maybe there's just no credible way to excuse lying, cheating, stealing, and destroying without mussing one's coif.

[napscoordinator]

The more this goes on the more I believe that Santorum should be the candidate. I know that I am going to vote for Newt and Perry if they are the nominee, but I think newt is too impulsive. Yes he is great with ideas but he says somethings that are so crazy. I can just see him doing that right in October and lose the election. That is my main problem with him. Santorum seems to have a steady hand to me.

[napscoordinator]

Are you serious? You better make sure your man Romney can weather the storm because Zero will certainly use this against him if he’s the nominee.

Well I am mainly for Santorum but thanks for the guess. Next time try a bit harder. Newt will now have his venture capital company analyzed to death. He BETTER BE squeaky clean. Newt is impulsive.

[Zhang Fei]

My guy is Santorum, but a lot of the attacks on Romney’s record at Bain are coming from a lefty perspective - why didn’t Romney maintain the cradle-to-grave welfare state type company policies that drove Mead, its original owner, to sell? Because they were money-losing policies. Here’s a rebuttal from a Romney supporter on the Ampad deal:
http://americaneedsmitt.com/blog/2011/06/17/romney-fact-checker-dissects-politico-lies/

---

“In 1992, Bain acquired American Pad & Paper. By 1999, the year Romney left Bain, two American plants were closed, 385 jobs had been cut and the company was $392 million in debt. The next year, Ampad was forced into bankruptcy.” (Politico, Lisa Lerer, 1/18/2008, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0108/7967.html)

Read those sentences (which are quoted from the article verbatim, without any editing) carefully, and pay attention to how they are ordered. They tell half-truths in order to get you to leap to conclusions that are full-out lies. From 1992 to 1999 is a span of seven years, during which time, yes, 385 jobs were lost, and two plants closed.

But here’s what they failed to mention:

On the very same day Bain acquired Ampad (and in fact, in the same press release), the previous owners (Mead) announced plans to cut 1,000 jobs over the next two years. Mead was anxious to get rid of Ampad for good reason, and was even willing to finance most of the deal to do so.
Ampad had acquired facilities at 21 separate locations, in 14 states, and the closing of two plants was a reasonable step to consolidate resources after purchasing 4 other companies (and all of their facilities) in less than 2 years.
One of those plants was shut down by a crippling union strike, not by Bain.
Being $392 million in debt sounds awful, until you realize that the annual revenues for this company were $689 million in 1997. In other words, the sum total of their debt was about 6 months worth of revenue. This is similar to an individual who earns $40K per year borrowing $20K to buy a car – hardly unreasonable by any objective standard.
“The next year, Ampad was forced into bankruptcy.” This makes it sound like the year after Bain acquired Ampad, they went bankrupt, but nothing could be further from the truth. Ampad entered into bankruptcy 8 years after Bain’s acquisition, and a full year after Romney left the company to run the Olympics.
The bankruptcy was involuntary, forced upon Ampad by the Bankers Trust New York Corporation and other creditors, not Bain.
Ampad now has 4,100 employees – almost twenty times the number they had when Bain acquired them.
When Ampad went bankrupt, Bain held stock amounting to 30% of the company. Bain took a huge loss when their stock became worthless, just like everyone else’s.

One hopes the writers at Politico were just being lazy or stupid, rather than malicious in reporting the story this way. For many years, the only source of information on this subject was the Boston Globe, which was firmly in the pockets of the AFL-CIO and the Kennedy camp during the heated Senate race between Kennedy and Romney in 1994. A single story that was written in 1994 has been the primary source of almost every article written about Ampad for the past 17 years. But we now have the benefit of hindsight and history. Looking back, we can now see that Ampad didn’t go out of business, it simply changed ownership, and in the long run, it didn’t lose 385 jobs, it gained about 3,500.

All told, Romney’s critics can really only point to three or four company acquisitions by Bain that went sour, out of hundreds, which is remarkable, especially considering the fact that Bain specialized in acquiring companies that were already in trouble. I’d say that’s a record that anyone would be proud of… well, anyone except for political hacks doing hatchet-jobs on Romney, and liberals who don’t understand anything about business.

---

[Diogenesis]

Then Santorum is OUT ... by his own choice to protect "Myth".

Romney makes Obama's ineligibility MOOT.
THAT is why the DNC wants him.

Romney makes Obama's ObamaCARE/RomneyCARE MOOT.
THAT is why the DNC wants him.

Romney makes Obama's IAG issues MOOT.
THAT is why the DNC wants him.

Romney makes Obama's Sharia issues MOOT.
THAT is why the DNC wants him.

Romney makes Obama's 911 Victory Mosque MOOT.
THAT is why the DNC wants him.

Romney makes Obama's RomneyMarriage/Gay Marriage issue MOOT.
THAT is why the DNC wants him.

Romney makes Obama's bad governmental history MOOT.
THAT is why the DNC wants him.

Romney makes Obama's AGW issue MOOT.
THAT is why the DNC wants him.

Romney makes Obama's liberal judge issue MOOT.
THAT is why the DNC wants him.

Romney makes Obama's ineptitude MOOT.
THAT is why the DNC wants him.

Romney makes Obama's lying as an issue MOOT.
THAT is why the DNC wants him.

Romney has history of backstabbing the GOP and is hated widely.
THAT is why the DNC wants him.

[driftless2]

If “conservative” candidates are going to attack Romney because his group terminated workers, we might as well fold our tents. The nature of free-market capitalism is that at times workers have to be let go for the benefit of the whole. It’s been done to me, and I fully understand the reaons. I didn’t like it at the time, but that’s the way of the world. A company that can’t let go of workers is a company that is either subsidized by the government or one that is soon to go out of business.

[b9]

:::hee hee::: “baloney boy”

[Vigilanteman]

Agreed. Newt and Perry using the Michael Moore attack line just threw this round to Romney. If Rick Santorum does well in South Carolina and Florida, though, we could still have a horse race.