Mitt Romney's Dilemma

   Well, to the surprise of no one who has followed the GOP primary battles, Mitt Romney secured the New Hampshire Republican nomination two weeks ago with 39 percent of the total vote, followed by Ron Paul with 23 percent, and the most credible candidate of the bunch Jon Huntsman Jr. with 18 percent.

   As short-term challengers like Herman Cain, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann flare briefly and then burn out, it’s been pretty evident for months now that the GOP national race is Romney’s to lose, despite the shallow support he engenders even among his constituents. And this is true even notwithstanding his defeat last week to Newt Gingrich in the South Carolina primary. Even so, and despite his definite gifts of both looking and sounding "presidential" and electable, he still arouses little enthusiasm among most "real" conservatives.

   There are a number of excellent reasons for this interesting disconnection, stemming from his business background with Bain Capital from 1984 to 1999, his political history as the "part-time" governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007, and his unarguable penchant for being a coreless flip-flopper on virtually every important issue. Let’s examine the first cause of this "Romney Dilemma."

   Back in 1994 when Mitt was running for the Massachusetts Senate seat against Ted Kennedy, a huge debating point that became a Romney albatross was the manner that this businessman-first candidate made his fortune as CEO and founder of Bain Capital, a Boston-based corporation that specialized in taking over many smaller companies nationally, ridding them of hundreds and often times thousands of their employees, and then reaping the benefits after each reorganization. Examples include Dade Behring Inc. of Illinois (1600 layoffs), Holson Burns of South Carolina (200 layoffs), Worldwide Grinding Systems of Kansas City (750 layoffs with no severance pay, and the concurrent ending of healthcare and other benefits for remaining employees), among over 150 other corporation examples.

   Gingrich put Romney’s Bain job-savaging practices in perspective on FOX News recently.

   "I’m for capitalism, I’m for free enterprise, I’m for entrepreneurs", he said. "There’s a big difference between people who go out and create a company — even if they fail — if they try to go in the right direction, if they share in the hardships, if they’re out there with the workers doing it together. That’s one thing. But if someone who is very wealthy comes in and takes over your company and takes out all the cash and leaves behind the unemployment? I think that’s not a model we want to advocate, and I don’t think any conservative wants to get caught defending that kind of model."

   Mitt Romney enjoys trumpeting on his stump speeches the 100,000 jobs he created during his time at Bain Capital, citing the three successful businesses that they served as a consultant on: Staples (89,000 jobs), The Sports Authority (15,000 jobs) and Domino's (7,900 jobs). However, the reality of that figure is that it both ignores the thousands of layoffs from those 150 other companies that Bain cannibalized, as well as the fact that the 100,000 figure takes into account ALL of the jobs created for the above three success stories up to the present, even though Romney left Bain back in 1999.    

   This renders Romney’s continuous and disingenuous attacks on President Barack Obama's record on employment ludicrous, as by that form of imaginative arithmetic the President should receive nothing but accolades for creating 1.5 million jobs in the midst of the recession he inherited, even though employment is technically down almost 1 million jobs overall since he took office.

    Again, the major difference here is that we’re now talking about a national statistic that is governed by many different factors, some in Obama’s control and some not, as opposed to the Romney slash-and-burn method that simply wiped out workers’ jobs and benefits while increasing Bain Capital’s share worth for their stockholders.

   And while firings, layoffs and benefit reductions are commonly done in the business world every day, Romney’s history of being the executive who actually did the force reductions to increase his own company’s market share, as well as his own personal wealth, understandably leave a bad taste in many voters’ mouths. Due to this callous history, most people would wager that he’d dearly love to take back his "I like to fire people" comment in New Hampshire two weeks ago, regardless of how both sides of the aisle have taken it out of context.