Bain Attacks aren't Really Relevant, but at Least They're Not Lies

I'm tiring a bit of all the breathless reporting about Mitt Romney's career at Bain, especially the latest kerfuffle about whether he left the company in 1999 (when he says he left) or 2002 (when Bain's legal filings say he did).  I guess this matters because Romney had earlier deflected criticism about Bain's investment in companies that specialized in outsourcing by saying that it happened after he left, when he was actually still technically there.  So now: he's a liar!!

Well, I'm perfectly willing to believe that Romney took a leave from day to day operations while he was running the Olympics, and that he was just a figurehead during that time with no significant hand in the business.

I'm also very sympathetic to the point that there's nothing wrong with outsourcing- the job of a business is to make money, and outsourcing increases profits so of course Bain was doing it.  Bain committed no sin.  Mitt Romney's real sin was his original defense of outsourcing, in which he fails to defend it on its merits and instead tries to deflect it by saying he wasn't responsible.

Of course we know why Romney defended himself that way: your average Joe Sixpack doesn't really agree that big businesses should be outsourcing American jobs and laying off workers.  The fact is that Bain did stuff like that, and lots of other stuff that was very bad for the workers in their companies.  Again, it was all legal and most of it was ethical too, at least in terms of the way the business world sees ethics these days.  But if people pay attention, it won't be very popular, and it points out the fact that Mitt Romney's experience in business didn't really give him experience in how to create jobs.  The Bain experience is best (for Romney) understood from 30,000 feet rather than in its particulars.

So now the Romney campaign has stumbled into a little mess.  To me, the whole thing also points out again how corporate executives are so different from the rest of us: Mitt could just take a leave of absence, keep getting paid, and then "retire retroactively" from his job.  It seems like the CEO class never has to take much of a chance- they always have a safety net.

Anyway, Mitt Romney's "lie" is unimportant, and doesn't tell us anything about how he'd be as president.  But these sorts of mini-scandals are what dominate campaigns these days since reporters can't be bothered to talk about real issues, so Democrats have to take advantage.

And in contrast to the mini-scandals that Republicans keep initiating, this one has the nice little bonus of being true in its particulars.  Irrelevant, but at least true.