I should have noted when we ran the clip that it's unfair to infer from this quote that Romney was talking about his time at Bain. He wasn't. He was talking about something else entirely, extolling the benefits of choice in a marketplace. To say or imply otherwise is, well, something Romney would do if Obama said it, but we shouldn't. This was a gaffe simply of presentation. It was how he put it, not what he said. But just as it's true in some sense that "corporations are people," it's still a dumb statement for Mitt Bain Romney to be saying in this climate.
It's also extremely dumb for Romney to say things like this:
“I know what’s it’s like to worry whether you’re going to get fired. There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip.”
And like so many of his other big lies, Romney cannot substantiate it. Each time Romney tries to connect with regular voters ("I'm unemployed too"), you want to curl up onto a little ball of excruciation. Perry picked up on the latest maladroit quote immediately:
“I mean, he actually said this,” Mr. Perry told more than 100 diners at a breakfast gathering here. “Now, I have no doubt Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out because his company, Bain Capital, of all the jobs that they killed,” Mr. Perry said. “I’m sure he was worried that he would run out of pink slips.”
And that seems to me the most telling quote of all. That Gingrich and Perry are openly using classic Democratic attack lines against Romney, especially with his record at Bain, is a sign to me that they suspect it could work. And if it can work against Romney in a Republican primary, imagine what could be done in a general election. Already, Perry has found a specific example to bring against Romney in South Carolina:
He said that people in nearby Gaffney, S.C., in particular, “would find his comments incredible,” because it is where Mr. Perry said Bain shut down a plant and fired 150 workers. “That didn’t happen until Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, they looted that company with more than $20 million in management fees.”
He also charged that Mr. Romney’s firm took $65 million in management fees out of a steel company in a deal in which 700 steelworkers in Georgetown, S.C., and Kansas City lost their jobs, their health insurance and “large portions” of their pensions.
“There’s nothing wrong with being successful and making money — that’s the American dream,” Mr. Perry said. “But there is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failures and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business. I happen to think that that is indefensible.” “If you are a victim of Bain capital’s downsizing, it’s the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina and tell you he feels your pain — because he caused it,” Mr. Perry said.
Jesus. "Looting"? Blaming Romney for unemployment?
Even the hardest of hardcore Republicans, like Perry, realize that this is now a populist election and their likeliest nominee is a plutocrat who stumbles every time he tried to relate to regular folks, and has a record at Bain that is a populist opponent's dream.
Donna Brazile was onto something. Romney is a man actually ill-suited to the temper of the times. If the economy is improving sufficiently, he will also be denied his core argument, that the president has made the Bush recession worse. He's weak. Perhaps the weakest of them all.
The Dish 