Has The Bain Baggage Damaged Romney?

Chait believes so:

After skating untouched through Saturday night’s debate, Romney endured a beating at the repeat performance Sunday morning, followed by an even rougher two days. The flurry of bad stories — check out this chart of how negative the coverage of Romney has turned — have exposed weaknesses that Romney had managed to keep at least partially concealed. The first is his tenure at Bain Capital. Romney has held this up to symbolize that he “understands” the private sector, “how jobs come and how they go”. Romney’s rivals, with the aid of some ill-chosen remarks by Romney, have turned it into a symbol of Romney’s imperiousness.

It won’t disqualify Romney against Obama, and it may not even be a serious liability, but it does seem that his strongest qualification has been effectively neutralized. 

Joe Klein differs:

[T]he fact that Bain has blown so big, so early may not be good news for Democrats. I remember in 2004, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe raised the chicken hawk Air National Guard charge against George W. Bush in a February appearance on Meet the Press. This gave the media and the candidate time to work through all the charges–which, to my mind, were never completely resolved. I’m sure John Kerry’s operatives would have liked to have had that issue in reserve in August when the Swiftboat Veterans began spewing their bile. It  might have thrown Bush onto the defensive at the outset of the general election, taking the heat off Kerry–the charges would have been new, fresh in August; it would have been absolutely necessary for Bush to deal with them. (As it was, Bush got the best of both worlds–the more serious charges, which involved Bush’s lackadaisical attitude toward military service, were handled in the Spring and CBS was suckered into broadcasting some phony documents in September, which undermined the credibility of the earlier, legitimate questions raised about Bush’s service.) The point is, if Romney wins the nomination, this early fuss might have inoculated him against the Scrooge gambit. The public may feel Bain is same old, same old by October.