Romney's "Summer of Bain" = Swift Boat 2.0 ?

[Indy Texas]

Yes, Obama's attacks on Romney's record at Bain are unfair. No, the fact that a company Bain Capital invested in outsourced jobs isn't especially important.

But none of this would hold water as much if Mitt Romney weren't basing his entire campaign for president on the idea that he "knows how to create jobs" - something which sounds even weirder when GOP doctrine suggests government can't create jobs.

It's worth remembering that the bulk of Mitt Romney's career was spent not as a private equity partner, but as a management consultant. It's being overly generous to place management consulting in the rough-and-tumble part of the business world. Management consultants are people who are paid a fee to give advice to companies; in that sense, it's really more like being a doctor or a lawyer than being an entrepreneur or a manager.

Romney's private equity record likewise says nothing about his ability to create jobs. It says much about his ability to generate profits. But anyone with a decent understanding of management knows that one of the quickest ways to increase a firm's profits is to eliminate jobs. No one starts a business to create jobs; they start a business to generate a return on their investment. Any jobs created are incidental. There shouldn't be anything wrong with this; I don't think "You make too much money" is a very salient insult. Liberals don't understand that. But conservatives need to dispense with the starry-eyed vision of people who sit in offices and say "Let's see how many jobs I can create today."

Mitt Romney was a good management consultant and a good private equity investor. But he hasn't done a good job of explaining how any of that entails he will be a good president. If anything, his management consulting experience would seem like a more logical jumping off point - many of the organizational problems companies experience have analogues in government agencies. Someone who knows how to make a major corporation run more efficiently could probably do the same for a Cabinet-level agency. But there will probably be layoffs involved.