I see little to be gained by attacking Mitt’s business experience. If Newt created his own company then he could talk.
But when you have Romney, who knows how the private sector actually works, even if it is flawed, versus Newt who has his own ideas of how the private sector ‘ought’ to work, based on what he read from a book, the debate is over before it even started.
The debate should’ve focused on Romney’s role in government because that’s what proves he’s a liberal.
“I see little to be gained by attacking Mitt’s business experience. If Newt created his own company then he could talk.”
I don’t quite see it that way. I think there is a valid tactical opening, but it has to be handled with finesse, and it wasn’t. It was slopped over. Mitt’s business experience is to be lauded. He is clearly skilled at what he does/did. His Salt Lake Olympics achievement is a fact, a matter of record. His track record at Bain is great. His goal there was (presumably) not to act as a private sector employment agency, but to make money for himself & investors. At that, he succeeded mightily.
The angle of attack is that “his success is your failure”. Him succeeding at that enterprise cost large number of jobs.
I am trying to be as specific as I can: If Mitt “does not connect” with voters (and you and I have both heard that) then the connection we DO want to forge is that of Mitt > job losses. That hits in the gut.
Secondarily, there was the opportunity for Newt to compliment Mitt on his biz success and make him own it, but at the same time, make him own the job losses. Also serves to disarm the extreme vitriol that was already clearly in the works when Newt decided to so blindly strike back. Why didn’t Newt talk about the XYZ corporation that lost 1300 jobs when the plant was closed and moved to China? Why didn’t he (if he wanted to get deeply into the weeds) go interview 3 people whose homes were foreclosed when they lost their jobs therefrom?
I repeat, it’s a tactic. I am entirely uncritical of Mitt’s investment activities, at last as far as I happen to know about them at this moment. Conducted poorly as it was, the tactic backfired on Newt. Remember, as we are seeing, it is not so much whether ones’ accusations against an opponent in this game are true; it is the effort and missteps and misstatements and the defensive postures that might be induced on the part of the opponent, the waste of media face time.
Not just one company, but several, including for-profit and non-profit, from scratch, actually creating jobs and helping conservative causes, organizations and candidates. What did Mitt and Rick do, except running for office all that time?
BTW, Gingrich was also on the board of one of the largest white-shoe PE firm, Forstman Little, so he knows and understands "capital" and "creative destruction" pretty well, and never attacked "capitalism," just unfounded and unsubstantiated claims by Romney that he "created" 100,000 jobs because he was, as Warren Buffett said, "shoving around money" at Bain and was a Governor (not much different from another investor, Senator, Governor from small New England state, Jon Corzine).
Gingrich's Secret Weapon: Newt Inc. - FR, 2012 January 25, / WSJ, by Neil King Jr. and Patrick O'Connor, 2011 May 09