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There are some jobs, while legal and perhaps necessary for society, that would disqualify someone holding them from running for office, particularly for the presidency. You won’t see any liquor store owners running for president anytime soon. People might like to drink alcohol, even make it a regular part of their life, but a lot of people think it contributes to death and the destruction of families and lives. Likewise, the guy who pushes the button to execute convicted killers. A lot of people might want to see them dead, but there wouldn’t be a lot of support for electing that person to high office. The same applies to former lobbyists: it is almost an outright disqualification for elective office in the minds of some, perhaps most, voters.
Mitt Romney was a kind of capitalist executioner. One of his jobs at Brain Capital was to spot wounded or dying companies, buy them at a low price, gut them of anything that wasn’t essential to making a profit out of the company and then prepare it for sale, either to another corporation or to the stock market. This is not a happy business. It is about hundreds, or even thousands, of people losing jobs and having their lives disrupted.
True capitalists to the core would argue that taking troubled companies off life support is actually doing a favor for society and business. It enables, they would say, that corporation to eventually prosper again by keeping the healthy parts and cutting away the waste.
On the other hand, and this is big, firms like Bain Capital are part of the problem in America now. They mean that no public company can be safely and quietly run by those in charge. The executives and directors always have to be looking over their shoulders, wondering who might be stalking them and what allegations might be filed against them in lawsuits alleging that they haven’t protected the interest of stock holders vigorously enough. Further, it is certainly possible that many of the businesses taken over by firms like Bain Capital could have found their way forward, with less disruption and loss of jobs, without an outside firm coming in to dictate the terms.
The irony for Mitt Romney is that our society honors those the most who pile up big wealth. It is this class of people who have the best chance to occupy significant offices like governor or US senator. In the popular mind, we still believe in success over almost everything else. (Then we want that person to prove he’s “ordinary” when running for president.) The very thing that allows someone like Romney to run for high office becomes a stumbling block to winning it.
Here is the question for Republican voters now and the general public in November: does Romney’s business history disqualify him from serving as president? How one answers the question is deeply personal. It depends, in part, on how well you understand big business as it is practiced in 21st century America and whether you or your family has been directly hurt by the dog-eat-dog ethos of current business operations. If you think of “free markets” as a kind of secular god, then you don’t care and you approve, ahead of time, almost anything business does. Most people do not have that attitude, however.
Leaving aside any antipathy that I would hold toward the Republicans in general, I would answer the question this way: if I were choosing someone to vote for as president, I would rather have someone from a far different background. Romney was not in “business” in the way the term is understood generally. He was at the upper levels of cash capitalism where the strong prey on the weak. He was in the slam-bang part of American business where money is made by careful calculation, skilled maneuvering and where timely re-sale deals are done behind closed doors, regardless of the consequences for jobs or, for that matter, the benefit that society might get from a given business. It is a cold, mathematically dominated world.
The company was also in the business of providing capital to start-up enterprises and helping them along. Venture capital firms have played a large role in funding new ideas and technologies. The catch for those with the ideas is that the venture fund often winds up owning the greatest share of what results, while the founders get small percentages. No one would argue, however, that venture firms are not part of the way that innovations and new ideas are brought into the marketplace.
I would much rather have a potential president someone who had actually built a business from the ground up or who had run a company over a period of years, in good times and bad, and who had proven a sense of caring for his employees, his community and the nation as a whole. That sort of business person is way out of fashion these days, but still exists. Electing someone with Romney’s background would, at minimum, have to include significant other signs of dedication and understanding of the general welfare. It would have to involve something more significant than running the winter Olympics and one term as governor of Massachusetts.
Republicans speak of Obama’s background as a “community organizer” with the utmost contempt. It fairly drips from their mouths when they say it, especially of the speaker is Sarah Palin or someone from the tea pot caucus. Somehow, Obama lowered himself in their eyes by trying to serve and help the people in Chicago early in his adult years. (The Obama haters focus on that time, because they wouldn’t be able to say “Professor of Constitutional Law” with the same sense of outrage, would they?)
This is how cheap and dirty our national politics have become. Anything and everything someone has done in their lives can be twisted to make it look bad, even while everyone realizes that people have to work their way up, that no one except a very few sons and daughters of the very wealthy have a chance to jump into executive positions at the start.
There is no job one can hold that would adequately prepare someone to be president. Being president is too varied, too dynamic and just too damn big. Republicans have focused on Obama’s lack of executive experience as a weak point and that clearly is a source of some difficulty for the president (we can’t know the full extent until history is written much later, however). Romney has been a business person who patrolled the upper reaches of American, grab-what-you-can capitalism. His primary opponents, especially Perry and Gingrich, are not going to let him, or the voters, forget that background.
Does the job he held represent a qualification or a disqualification for the presidency? Certainly, he can claim experience at a level of business dealings that most people in business cannot, for better or worse. By making a claim on the campaign trail that he was involved in the creation of 100,000 jobs, Romney opened the debate by trying to get credit for what might or might not have been the eventual outcome of Bain’s investments and management consulting. Firms taken over by outside investors often do well after the rough justice of an imposed take over, but the cost is often in trading well paid jobs in established businesses for lower paying jobs in ones that are run with much more intense focus profits.
There is nothing on record that would indicate a “smoking gun” allegation against Romney in his Bain Capital involvement. There can be no doubt, however, that the role of such firms is controversial and, by no means, do such firm have only a positive role in American business and society. Where one comes down on the issue of Romney and the presidency in this regard depends, in large measure, on which side of the fence you are sitting.
There is no doubt that private equity firms have played a role in destabilizing American business. Workers often lose their jobs in an abrupt, rude manner that leaves them confused and confounded. Businesses which have been built up for decades are sometimes treated like toys by outsiders who don’t understand the fundamentals of the business they are buying into, nor why it has been successful in the past. Capitalists argue that all of this, in the end, has good results. I disagree. The way capital moves around can create violent dislocation and result a much more brutal system where nothing counts but money and how to churn it out for the private equity firm involved in the take over. In many cases, we wind up not with better products and services, but mean, highly focused businesses that treat the customer as the enemy.
Doug Terry, 1.12.12
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