William Jacobson defends Gingrich's counter-attack on Romney, which Krauthammer criticized as "socialist" and George Will has called a "capital crime":
While Gingrich’s comments were ill-advised on a number of levels, it was not an attack on capitalism or socialist to criticize certain types of predatory takeover practices which were epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. What we saw then, in a number of cases, were not true turn-around situations, but stripping companies of assets both explicitly and through extraordinary management fees, leaving a shell of a company and unemployed workers. It may not have been illegal, but it certainly was not something to praise. I don’t know if Bain under Mitt Romney’s tutelage engaged in such practices. Certainly many people have made the case that it did, and it was used to great effect against Romney in his loss to Ted Kennedy.
Steven Bainbridge defends Romney and points to research finding that private equity firms usually boost employment:
Job losses are concentrated in takeovers that are visible to the media and therefore to the public. The public doesn't see the vastly larger number of acquisitions of privately held companies, which "exhibit large employment gains." In sum, employment losses as a result of private equity transactions are modest and a consequence of the creative destruction process by which capitalism periodically shakes up firms that have become inefficient dinosaurs.
Above is an ad that Ted Kennedy chose not to run against Romney in '94. Here is an ad along similar lines that Kennedy went with instead.
The Dish 