Rolling Stone throws rocks at Romney

As an early-adopter of the Barack Obama vaporware, Rolling Stone is apparently determined to bolster the besieged President it has long exalted.  Bereft of any significant Obama accomplishments to apotheosize, Matt Taibbi has resorted to concocting a fable to vilify Mitt Romney, “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and BainCapital.”

Taibbi's character assassination begins by attempting to discredit Romney’s business track record.  This canard is completely contradicted by none other than former President Bill Clinton, who, in a CNN interview, described Romney’s Bain career as “sterling.” 

 

Nevertheless, Taibbi insults his readers’ intelligence by claiming that Bain Capital and other private equity firms have, for decades, duped legions of sophisticated financial players into repeatedly investing in schemes that only enrich the PE firms’ diabolical owners.  That hoards of hapless, salt-of-the-earth American businesses - "companies that make things," in Taibbi's words - were serially swept-up then destroyed by covetous Bain con-artists.

Following Bain Capital’s investment, once-teetering Steel Dynamics prospered, and is today one of America's largest steel makers.  This is but one of many successful Bain investments in “companies that make things” Taibbi blithely ignores in weaving his defamatory tale.

Steve Rattner, the Obama Administration’s auto bail-out czar and a longtime Democratic heavyweight, called-out Obama’s campaign for similar over-the-top attacks against Romney and Bain:

 

“Bain Capital’s responsibility was not to create 100,000 jobs or some other number. It was to make profits for its investors, most of whom were pension funds, endowments, and foundations," he said on MSNBC.  "It did it superbly well, acting within the rules, acting very responsibly, and was a leading firm. To pick out an example of somebody who lost their job, unfortunately, this is part of capitalism, this is part of life. I don’t think there’s anything Bain Capital did that they need to be embarrassed about.”

 

Based on their nationally-televised comments, many right-wing economic Darwinists like Newark mayor Cory Booker, former Pennsylvania governor and DNC chairman Ed Rendell and former Democratic congressman Harold Ford agree.

 

Indeed, the thousands of retired workers, college scholarship recipients and nonprofit organization clients who are today benefiting from Bain Capital’s investment prowess can thank Mitt Romney for his seminal role in the firm’s founding and success.

Not surprisingly, Taibbi also redacted the reality that some of the Obama campaign's biggest donors are principals in private equity firms which operate under exactly the same paradigm Taibbi's article demonizes.  And that the Obama campaign and Democrats were the recipients of nearly 80% of Goldman Sachs’  political donations in ’08 and 70% of all Wall St. political dollars that year. 

 

Beyond the Obama Administration’s indebtedness to Wall Street donors, Attorney General Eric Holder’s justice department is laden with Wall St. lawyers on-leave.

Is it any wonder that not a single Wall Street executive – including the maladroit and malevolent Jon Corzine - has been aggressively pursued by the Obama DOJ?

Needless to say, a piece designed to create a Dickensian caricature of Mitt Romney devotes no space to such questions.

While it doesn't fit Taibbi’s leitmotif, the Romney/Ryan tax reforms would eliminate many of the tax advantages and loopholes Taibbi laments, while lowering overall rates. This would provide exactly the kind of playing field leveling between financial companies and manufacturers Taibbi would seem to endorse.

President Obama has refused to even attempt comprehensive tax reform, despite the urgent recommendations of his own Simpson-Bowles debt commission.

In the midst of a protracted jobs crisis unlike anything America has seen since the Great Depression, while on the precipice of a “fiscal cliff” that the OMB says could bring about a new recession, Obama has hosted over 200 campaign fundraisers with fat-cats – more than the three previous President’s combined – and set a new record for golf outings.

I’m sure that a lot of private equity firm partners would envy our President’s “work” regimen, though it might be somewhat disconcerting to the 24 million jobless or underemployed Americans who rightfully expect a fully-engaged President.

 

Obama's laxity stands in marked contrast to Romney’s consistently successful hands-on leadership style.

In Massachusetts, a state engulfed in red ink, with a legislature that was 85% Democratic, Governor Romney balanced the budget every year and left a sizable rainy day fund – without raising taxes. He dramatically improved the state’s business climate and elevated Massachusetts’ job creation rank from dead-last to 28th in less than four years.

As a result of Romney’s masterful management of the state government, Massachusetts’ credit rating was raised.

That compares rather favorably to the Obama administration. After spending almost a trillion dollars on “stimulus” and adding $5 trillion to our national debt, we have nearly half-a-million fewer people working than when President Obama took office and now, officially, the worst economic recovery since records have been kept. Under Obama, we have the fewest new business start-ups in 30 years. Because of Obamacare, according to a recent poll, 75% of small businesses are reluctant to hire. One year ago, our nation’s credit rating was downgraded for the first time in American history.

Not satisfied with merely besmirching Romney’s business career, Taibbi’s hit-piece attempts to debase Romney’s storied success rescuing the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.

First, Taibbi leaves out the fact that, upon taking over the scandal-ridden Games, Romney contributed $1 million to the Olympics, and donated all three years of the salary he earned as President and CEO ($275,000 per year). In effect, Romney forwent $1.8 million for the privilege of working 60+ hours per week saving the Winter Games.

Taibbi then deliberately leaves the false impression that Romney relied on government funds to close the Games’ massive deficit.  He fails to remind readers of one small detail:  the Salt Lake City games occurred on the heels of 9/11 and were an obvious terrorist target.  So, while Romney did succeed in securing significant additional government funds for the event, they were primarily to ensure robust security - not, as Taibbi falsely implies, to fund the Games' operations.

Instead, Romney shored-up the Games' finances by building a stellar management team, providing inspiring leadership and personally enlisting major sponsors. Despite 9/11 security concerns and the Games’ tainted reputation, Romney sold the most tickets and generated the most sponsorship revenue in Olympics history. The Salt Lake City Games ended with a $100 million surplus.

And, as anyone who's researched Mitt Romney or watched the moving testimonies in Thursday night’s Republican Convention knows, Romney is the antithesis of the rapacious reprobate depicted in Tiabbi’s vituperative fiction.

In April 2011, President Obama said, “It's a basic reflection of our belief that those who benefited most from our way of life can afford to give back a little bit more.”  Well, one man competing for the Presidency in 2012 walks the walk.

According to Romney’s 2010 income tax return, he “gave back” 16.4% of his income to charity – almost triple the 6.1% Obama donated to charity in 2006, two years before the President was elected.  For the preceding six years, Obama gave an average of 1.5% of his income to charity; between 2000 and 2004, before becoming a national political figure, Obama donated between 0.4 and 1.4%.

Romney has never contributed less than 10% of his income to charity.

In addition, Romney devoted over 20 hours per week to his role as Boston Bishop of the LDS (Mormon) church – while building Bain Capital.  A just-published Washington Post article details Romney’s heartfelt devotion to his flock during that period, personally counseling and assisting countless members enduring financial and family crises.  The WP story also describes, in great detail, Romney’s ardent efforts to recruit and help Haitian immigrants and Hispanics.

Taibbi’s dark, anti-Romney yarn - like the Obama campaign's nauseating negative advertising - is as ineffective as it is intellectually dishonest.  Americans are coming to the realization that Obama’s big-talking, self-aggrandizing, “phone it in” approach to the Presidency has been disastrous - and that it's time for a change.

Mitt Romney, perhaps the most broadly competent and authentically munificent man to run for President in recent history, is that change.

 

 

Medicare: The Romney/Ryan Checkmate

Driven by hubris, unwittingly abetted by the elite media, Obama and the Democrats have just ensnared themselves in one of the most artfully laid traps in the history of Presidential politics.

Desperate to distract voters from an inexcusably atrocious economic record, Obama & Co. was ecstatic when Mitt Romney named Paul Ryan as his running mate.  Ryan’s plan to fix Medicare, they gleefully gloated, would cause senior citizens to flock to the President, hand Florida to Obama and calcify their carefully-crafted ObaMyth:  Mitt Romney, The Cold-Blooded Cipher.

Instead, Romney’s selection of Ryan has defined the soon-to-be Republican standard-bearer as a serious man for serious times, completely secure with himself, brilliant at divining talent and blessed with unexpectedly exquisite political instincts.

And Team Romney couldn’t have asked for a better predicate to the Ryan roll-out than Obama’s sordid and specious “Death by Bain” TV ad.   Just as even respected Democrats and liberal media pundits were expressing shock and indignation at this new low in Chicago-style politics-by-character assassination, Romney enlisted a real-life “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

Paul Ryan is exactly the kind of candidate dispirited and disgusted voters have been pining for – but thought didn’t exist.

Worst of all for Democrats – and contrary to conventional wisdom – having Ryan on the ticket will completely neutralize what was sure to be Obama’s next line of attack, irrespective of Romney’s VP:  MediScare.

Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was right in 2009 when she said, “We’ll have to pass the bill to see what’s in it.”  In fact, until a few days ago, the vast majority of senior citizens still didn’t comprehend that over $700 billion will be sucked out of Medicare to offset Obamacare.  Or that future Medicare costs will be controlled by IPAB – an unelected Star Chamber vested with the power to deny medical procedures to seniors, regardless of the doctor’s or patient’s wishes.

Older Americans were already repelled by Obamacare - even more than their younger cohorts.  Many saw its mandates and micromanagement as un-American, its costs frightening in an era of exploding deficits and its authors alien to their beliefs.

Yet most of these seniors never dreamed that Obamacare would financially gut and ration their Medicare.  Now, with Romney’s selection of Ryan, and the attendant saturation media coverage of the Medicare issue, "the word is out."

On last Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” former Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean actually said, “Seniors will never believe that Democrats cut Medicare.”  And, under normal circumstances, he’s probably right.  But what Dean and other Democrat operatives have failed to fully account for is the extent to which anything associated with Obama and Obamacare is toxic to senior citizens.

Add the fact that objective news outlet Fox News Channel’s dominance in the cable news realm is particularly pronounced among seniors. 

Clearly, the politically astute Romney understands this.  And, as a disciple of data, he can read the numbers. 

Even in the latest CNN/ORC poll – which dubiously showed Obama to be leading Romney among all voters by seven points – Romney routed the President among senior citizens by a whopping 14-point margin, making voters 65 and older Romney’s strongest demographic by far.

So Romney knew he started with a significant margin of safety among older voters.  And, after spending many days campaigning side-by-side and commiserating with Ryan, he came to believe that, with this refulgent man of rectitude on his team, he could surmount Obama’s scary rhetoric with straight talk.

Ryan can help make the point that his Medicare plan wouldn’t have impacted anyone over age 55 when enacted; that liberal and longtime senior citizen advocate Democratic Senator Ron Wyden signed-on to the plan; that the Ryan/Wyden proposal capped future Medicare spending at exactly the same levels as does Obama’s budget.

Unlike Obama’s budget, however, Ryan's plan didn't allow Medicare to become insolvent in 12 years.  It didn’t ration care and unrealistically cut payments to health care providers – further reducing the number of providers accepting Medicare.  Instead, the Ryan plan relied on competition and individual choice to keep health care quality high and health care costs in check.

Romney and Ryan have repeatedly emphasized that the plan to save Medicare Ryan crafted in Congress isn’t the final iteration.  Team Romney will further hone it in coming weeks.

Now that seniors are finally learning the truth, Romney/Ryan is not only a nightmare for Obama and his comrades – but for all Democrats who’ve been fleeing from the odious Obamacare and were counting on having MediScare as a weapon in their campaign arsenal.