The unprecedentedly bitter infighting among the GOP presidential hopefuls has taken an even more pernicious turn with the release of Newt Gingrich’s 27-minute video attack on Mitt Romney’s past as a “job destroyer” during his tenure at Bain Capital, a private equity firm that the Massachusetts governor helped found.
Rick Perry got in on the action on FOX News on Monday, telling Megyn Kelly in this video clip:
When you go to Gaffney, South Carolina, which is one of the towns we’re going to be visiting, again, that was one of those cities that had a business. It was a photo album and a framing business. And those people are out of work today after Bain Capital basically gutted the company….
These attacks by Romney’s fellow Republicans do more than just damage the current front-runner. They damage the party brand and play directly into Barack Obama’s class warfare meme.
These critiques are doubly misguided in that the label “predatory corporate raider” is a mischaracterization—and the candidates know it. A Wall Street Journal analysis of 77 businesses Bain invested in while Romney was CEO reveals that the company enjoyed considerable success:
[I]n total, Bain produced about $2.5 billion in gains for its investors in the 77 deals, on about $1.1 billion invested. Overall, Bain recorded roughly 50% to 80% annual gains in this period, which experts said was among the best track records for buyout firms in that era.
The analysis notes some failures as well:
22% [of the companies] either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses. An additional 8% ran into so much trouble that all of the money Bain invested was lost.
There is no doubt that the Obama campaign would have accentuated the negatives even without the help of Romney’s GOP rivals. The question is why they are going out of their way to play devil’s advocate when it will ultimately come back to hurt all of them. As Michelle Malkin writes, these
incompetent non-Romneys have morphed into Michael Moore propagandists—throwing not just Bain Capital under the bus, but wealth creators of all kinds who take risks in the private marketplace.
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