(CONNECTICUT) – Republican Mitt Romney is expected to announce his choice for a running mate as early as this week. Given that the centerpiece of his presidential campaign nearly fell to pieces last week, the sooner he changes the subject, the better.
Throughout the primary and general election, Romney has said that he left his Wall Street company, Bain Capital, in 1999. Yet recent press reports have cast doubt on that. All of them cite documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showing that Romney was the owner of the private equity firm until at least 2002.
Here’s the reason that this is important: After 1999, by most accounts, Bain started investing in companies that outsourced American jobs overseas. Some of these, according to The Washington Post, were “pioneers” of the trend.
If he retained ownership of Bain during this period, that shatters the central premise of Romney’s campaign: As a former businessman, I know how to create jobs.
President Barack Obama would prefer kneecapping this potent “jobs-creator” claim once and for all, and according to polls taken in swing states where outsourcing has been most destructive over 20 years, his attacks are working.
This panicked Romney on Friday into a media blitz with interviews on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN. “I had no role whatsoever in the management of Bain Capital after February of 1999,” Romney told CNN. He variously added that Obama’s attacks on his business record are the telltale sign of a desperate campaign willing to say anything to win and that the attacks are beneath the dignity of a sitting president.
If you hear whining, you’re not alone. Republicans are now begging Romney to release more than one year of tax returns to put a stop to the blood-letting. Liberals have suggested he stanch the bleeding by embracing his robber baron pedigree instead of fleeing from it. As for Obama’s attacks, they haven’t been desperate so much as devastating for the simple reason that they are (mostly) true.
Perhaps this was inevitable. Romney had farcical competition during the primary. Now he’s getting hit hard by pros. But the task is made easier, I suspect, because Romney appears to have led a life in which legal fictions played a structural role. Cast a little sunlight on them, as the press has, and then fling a little mud on them, as Obama has, and the whole thing comes crashing down.
But when did Romney leave Bain? It doesn’t matter — for two reasons.
One, Romney invested millions in a Chinese company that explicitly depended on outsourcing American manufacturing jobs, according to David Corn of Mother Jones (who, by the way, broke the SEC documents story). This happened in 1998.
Two, Romney shared in Bain’s gains long after leaving in 1999 — or whenever he left the firm for real. That was part of his retirement deal. He profited from whatever Bain did, good or bad, so the exact date of departure is essentially meaningless.
If so, why did Romney come unglued last week? Well, it wasn’t the first time. And each time his record is questioned, he ends up resorting to legal hairsplitting.
After the Post report on Bain’s investing in outsourcing “pioneers,” Romney said the reporters didn’t distinguish “outsourcing” from “offshoring.” He even went toe-to-toe with the editors of the Post, demanding a retraction (they said no).
After the AP reported on Romney’s tax-sheltered investments in Bermuda, he said he knew nothing about them, because those investments are managed by blind trust.
And last week, Romney hoped to make clear the fundamental difference between managing and owning a company when in fact the only salient difference is a legal one: an owner can’t be liable for possible improprieties of management.
In each of these cases, Romney appears to think that not knowing about something — like whether his money is being held in offshore tax havens — makes benefiting from it morally OK. And Romney appears to be stunned that the court of public opinion would find him guilty when no court of law would. Like a textbook Wall Street executive, legal distinctions — like between owning and managing — are the same as moral ones.
This, to me, is Romney’s soft political underbelly, and the Obama team may know it. When Romney picks a running mate, he will win a reprieve. But not for long.