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Huff Post
Mitt Romney
Bain Mess Shows Stonewalling Consequences
07/13/2012
WASHINGTON
-- It takes perverse talent to turn a two-day mini-story into a major
three-week distraction. But that is precisely what Mitt Romney’s
campaign has
done with a June 21 story in the Washington Post. As a result, they’re
losing
valuable media time playing defense when they should be using every
waking
second and news cycle to remind voters about how crappy the economy is
and why
President Barack Obama should be blamed for it.
First, here
is what the Romney camp did wrong. They screwed up even before the Post
story
appeared, by stiffing the paper and not giving the reporter answers to
questions about Romney and his company Bain Capital. Bain had invested
in
companies that were developing business in domestic outsourcing and
foreign
offshoring of production costs. But rather than answer, Bain issued a
bland
non-statement. If Romney and Bain had engaged on the story in advance,
they
might have been able to explain the difference between outsourcing and
offshoring. They also might have been able to point out that this was a
small
part of the business, and an unavoidable trend that, in fact, protected
many
American jobs by making the American-based companies in question more
efficient.
The Romney
camp in Boston waited a full six days to hit the alarm box after the
story was
published, and long after the Obama camp took the headline and facts in
the
story and twisted them to their own advantage. This is an eon of time
in modern
campaigning, when every tweet is its own news cycle. And as if to
highlight
their slow-off-the-mark response, the Mittsters formed a delegation and
flew to
Washington to personally demand a retraction by the paper, which they
accused of
conflating outsourcing with offshoring. Having brushed off the paper in
advance, they arrived with a dossier and demanded results. Not
surprisingly,
they failed.
The Romney
campaign’s next move was to strenuously point out that Obama’s stimulus
package
directly poured money into foreign, as opposed to American, jobs, by
funneling
grants to overseas energy companies. This would have been a good retort
-- had
the campaign thought of using it right away, not after Team Obama had
gone up
with an attack ad.
Around that
time, the Romney camp committed its biggest mistake, basing their
defense of
the candidate on the theory that he had bowed out of any role in Bain
as of
early 1999, and, as such, could not be blamed for any offshoring,
consulting or
other work that Bain did thereafter. This was too cute by half.
For one,
were they saying that there was a lot of offshoring, but that Mitt
wasn’t
around for it? Or were they saying that there wasn’t any offshoring, at
least
none that Bain was responsible for?
For
another, the timeline defense is opening an entire new line of media
inquiry
about the facts -- and opening a new line of inquiry is the last thing
you want
to do. And the question was -- and is -- whether Mitt Romney was really
and
truly dialed out of Bain, and too busy in Salt Lake City with preparing
for the
Olympics to notice that American jobs were being shipped overseas?
It didn’t
take reporters long to start digging through documents. Fortune
magazine found
some documents supporting Romney’s narrative. But others found that, in
SEC
filings, Romney’s name was listed as the leader of record of Bain
through
2002...
Read the
rest of this and other articles at Huff Post
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