Friendly Reminder: keep it simple
“I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation,” said Marc B. Walpow, a former managing partner at Bain who worked closely with Romney for nine years before forming his own firm. “The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.”
This is true, of course. And we can debate whether or not that’s a good thing for America in general. But it crashes headlong into Mitt’s “business” experience as a qualification for president.
I think the Obama campaign gets this:
“If you’re a head of a large private equity firm or hedge fund, your job is to make money,” Obama told CBS News. “It’s not to create jobs. It’s not even to create a successful business — it’s to make sure that you’re maximizing returns for your investor.”
Obama told Charlie Rose of CBS This Morning that private equity — which Romney practiced at Bain Capital — is “appropriate” work, “but that doesn’t necessarily make you qualified to think about the economy as a whole. Because, as president, my job is to think about the workers. My job is to think about communities, where jobs have been outsourced.”
Indeed. In fact, it’s a great opportunity to start pushing back in general on the idea that running the government is like running a business. (If we can persuade them to stop saying the government budget is like a typical household budget, we’ll really be getting somewhere.)
Update: