Contributors

Sunday, July 15, 2012

The Romney Doctrine

In the last few days there's been a lot of arguing about exactly what W. Mitt Romney did at Bain, and when he stopped doing it. The essence of the story, as reported in the Boston Globe, is this:
[A] Massachusetts financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003 states that he still owned 100 percent of Bain Capital in 2002. And Romney’s state financial disclosure forms indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain “executive” in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.

There are reports of much closer ties between Bain and Romney during this period, but they're coming from the Huffington Post, and I trust them little more than I trust Fox News.


Usually people have to wait until they're elected president to have a doctrine named after them. Mitt Romney already has one teed up: "I wasn't directly responsible." He sounds like a concentration camp guard, using the CEO version of "I was just taking orders."


According to the Romney Doctrine, he wasn't running Bain after 1999 and therefore wasn't "technically" responsible for whatever it did. Yet the company was his baby—his legacy, he owned it, he received a salary twice as large as the average American and he still claims credit for Bain's success stories, like Staples, during that period.

Time for an analogy. Let's say there was a wealthy Massachusetts businessman who owned a really expensive sports car. Before he set off to Utah on a skiing trip he gave his teenaged sons the keys to that car. He didn't transfer the registration or the car insurance, saying he might do so when he got back from vacation.

When the sons used the car to drive old ladies to the grocery store, the businessman  bragged about what great sons he had raised. But when they got speeding tickets, then drove drunk, and finally crashed the car into a line of people outside a popular Boston club and killed three girls, the businessman said that he had disowned those rotten kids the instant he handed over the keys to the car.


Technically, the businessman wouldn't be criminally liable for those girls' deaths. He couldn't go to jail. But his insurance company would have to pay up, and the parents of those girls would sue him for millions. And probably win.

When Romney rode off to rescue the Olympics, he gave the keys to the corporation to his Bain underlings. But unlike the sons who drove recklessly, the underlings operated Bain no differently after 1999: they made money for Romney and themselves, damning the consequences to American jobs. "Technically" Romney didn't fire the people who lost their jobs due to Bain's machinations, but he set the pattern, still received a salary and still had complete ownership of the company.

Romney wants to have it both ways. He takes credit for the positive things Bain did during his absence, and disavows the bad things. By trying to weasel out of his association with Bain after 1999, Romney has conceded that Bain destroyed American jobs and hurt America.

While "technically" winning this argument about his direct involvement, morally and ethically Romney has lost.

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