The New Left is all in.
Yes, the Romney response to attacks on Bain have been weak and feckless (at least, up until yesterday) — a hint of which we saw in the GOP primaries when some of Romney’s primary challengers decided to go anti-capitalist, as well. At which time I commented that Romney has trouble responding because he lacks an actual conservative world view — that his “severe conservatism” was in fact a canned set of talking points, because Romney himself is a centrist technocrat, not a conservative statesman.
So let me offer the Romney campaign some help: the fact that the Democrats are united around attacks on Bain Capital is a very good thing. Because for actual conservatives and classical liberals and libertarians confident in their belief in free market capitalism, the answer to their attacks couldn’t be easier: using private capital, Romney and his company invested in businesses that needed help and were worth taking a financial risk on. That investment, which oftentimes streamlined the businesses and made them more profitable, in essence saving them, is part of the risk / reward nature of investment, and in many respects the very lifeblood of the capitalist system.
Winning isn’t guaranteed. Which is why the private risk involved is just that: a risk. Some risks lead to great rewards. Others fail. But the idea that it is more noble for the government to take taxpayer money — our money — and decide where to invest it, without our say so, and then fail, is ignoble on its face.
The government isn’t risking anything of its own; it’s risking our money. And the idea that people like Harry Reid or Barack Obama or Chuck Schumer or Barney Frank know better than us how to risk our own money — with the reward, should it come, going only to them (so they can spend it as they see fit, oftentimes as sops to their constituencies), while the risk is all ours — well, that’s not only not noble but it is, frankly, immoral.
The Obama campaign wants to make Bain Capital — and by extension, the entire capitalist system — a villain in a debate over social morality (or, to use their phrase, “social justice”). That is, they’ve embraced Marxism.
Unfortunately for us, we’re in a place where it is up to the Romney campaign to defend capitalism against the immoral scourge of the liberal fascists and their crony capitalist gambits (sold to us, repulsively, as Marxist “fairness” and egalitarianism); and Romney’s kneejerk response, to talk about Bain Capital as if it were some commensurate enterprise to the government’s social justice paradigm, out to save jobs for people rather than to save companies and improve them, which in turn creates profit, which leads to new hires, expansion both home and abroad, and general growth and wealth creation, that has always been his messaging problem.
One of the two major parties in the US is adopting, as its campaign strategy, an unabashed frontal attack on private enterprise and the productive class. That is, they are openly, if still obliquely, pushing democratic socialism.
If the GOP can’t figure out a way to, ahem, capitalize on that, well, then we’re through as the country we’ve always been, anyway.
Sometimes I wonder if the problem isn’t the message or the messenger, but the audience. Thirty years ago, few of the people I ran into doubted the wisdom of free markets. Today, large numbers of people believe in unicorns, and the funny part is they consider themselves part of the reality based community.
I don’t think the New Left has thought through what ‘all in’ means, at least not in the context of their presumption that their vision of government would take ownership of the lives of every American, and in the event, dispossess every American of the personal liberties by which they live. But then, maybe the New Left wants a punch in the mouth?
A notion that has to be exposed as Marxist, yet such an exposure consistently falls under the wheels of the Establican’s mere passive appeal to jobs, which is to say that the establishment is the gang that can’t ever shoot straight: Yesterday the Democrats pled to Teh Bernanke to flood the nation with cheap paper money. Should He do so at just the right moment Obama would benefit and the Republicans would have lost their entire message.
Such as it is.
We’re still playing Clinton’s Maxim about the economy. I cring whenever I hear Romney play defense, which is to say I cringe at nearly everything Romney says. Indeed, Romney himself is a centrist technocrat, not a conservative statesman.
That, which also defines Romney’s latitude. Tomato, tomato.
What will it take to bring the conservative message back to foundational principles and away from sound bite politicking? Probably the end of the Republican Party, which is to say, the end of the nation as we once knew it. Fortunately Romney is polling just under Obama, probably to Gabe Malor’s endless anxiety.
We may be closer than ever.
The Conservative Movement Has Been a Failure.
If you hate capitalism you don’t know what the word means. Long live the Republican Party.
Bourgeoisie, “we hates it, we hates it, we hates it forever!”
He didn’t seem to have this problem during the primary. I seem to recall full throated defense of Bain’s history, particularly in response to Newt’s attacks. He knows how to tell this story, and it’s easy to remember because it’s true.
So just do it, Mitt.
Adventures in Obamanomics: Chevy Volt Makes NO Money, Costs Taxpayers Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars Per Car
Obamanomics Theory:
The work under consideration? Is to be performed by Earth Supply and Renewal.
I remember it differently. I remember him buying into the left’s tropes and talking about saving jobs rather than about risk/ reward, capitalism, etc.
Yesterday he was much better.
We’re going to get rich by breaking windows!
By the way, did I mention I did 540# in the two-handed dead lift last night? And that I got 550# off the ground twice in three tries (but not enough to make it official)? No?
Fixed.
Rrrrrrrrroar.
He’s done both, though I’m not sure I’d necessarily characterize it as buying into the left’s trope. Unemployment being one of the defining issues of this campaign, it’s incumbent upon a candidate to say what he’s going to do to improve the job market or “create jobs” as we like to say these days. In Romney’s case, that seems to be getting the government out of the way versus Obama’s intent to find more stuff to “invest” in. He needs to make that argument.
Maybe Romney could mention some of the stuff Obama’s hiding: college transcripts, student loan apps, Fast & Furious documents, etc.
And I’m not a birther–I think if O’s mother was an American citizen, he is, too–but I am pretty sure that wasn’t his actual birth certificate he released. I’m a couple years younger, and I was born in a podunk hospital in Missouri, not in the largest city in the state, and my birth certificate doesn’t look like a crappy P-shop job.
Jeff, you didn’t lift all that weight by yourself, you know. Somebody else made that happen.
Rrrrrrrrroar.
Now go put a whole mag into the bull at 7 yds.
Romney is burnin’ down the house in Ohio. Standing O from the audience.
Romney is burnin’ down the house in Ohio. Standing O from the audience.
Is that supposed to make me feel better, or worse? HHOS!
While I hope Romney keeps talking like that, how truly free are we truly if we measure freedom by who picks up the tab for our healthcare?
Maybe Romney is doing a rope-a-dope: letting Obama attack him seemingly unchalenged on his strong suit, only to give him both barrels once Obama is overextended and overcommitted to that line of attack. Brilliant, really.
No, I’m not buying that theory either.
Earth Supply and Renewal is missing a bet. As an archaeologist I keep the holes I dig. Instead of filling them in I haul them back to my yard and stockpile them. Then if someone needs a hole that’s say 10′ deep, 20′ wide, and 50′ long for a house basement, I sell him 80 of my standard 5′ x 5′ x 5′ holes. Just truck them over to his job site and install them with a backhoe.
When I explain this to people I’ve had them nod and tell me that makes a lot more sense than filling the holes in and letting all that labor just go to waste….
Just truck them over to his job site and install them with a backhoe.
can i order online?