Mitt Romney’s career as a venture capitalist has become a point of attack by his political enemies, both Republican and Democratic. His supporters have fallen back on the defense that these attacks are about class warfare, envy and a hatred of success. It is an understandable, if misguided defense.
I have sympathy for the people trying to defect this line of attack. This is an emotionally very charged and very effective line to use against Mitt Romney, but why is that? Are these charges generated by class envy, by people who are jealous of Romney’s success and vast fortune?
I do not think so. First if that were the case then there are very serious issues with American culture. For these lines of attack based upon envy and hatred alone is to say that Americans are on a whole are class-oriented, greedy, and ignorant. Traits I do not think or would even suggest are true. Evidence of this is just how much hero worship we American lay at the feet of immensely successful businessmen.
In my opinion one of the reasons why this line of attack is so devastating is because Romney’s success actually flies in opposition to our cultural expectations for how the game is played. It is because even if they don’t know the term people see Mitt Romney as a Rules Lawyer, a person who manipulates the minutia of the rules to his advantage while violating the spirit of the competition.
What did Mitt Romney do at Bain Capital? He helped buy up struggling companies, make them more efficient, usually including massive layoffs, took out massive loans against the newly structured company, paying himself hefty fees from the loan money, and then released the indebted companies into the wild. If they survived and thrived, Mitt Romney, and Bain’s Investors made a ton of money from the successful venture, if the company failed, well Bain Capital and Mitt Still did well from the fees that they had extracted. They, Bain Capital, only really lost if the company went under before they could take out the loans to pay their fee with. It was a win/win for Bain and its investors. This is at odds with the romantic notion we have about capitalism and the risks taken by plucky men and women starting up their own companies.
Consider a number of other highly respected capitalists in our country.
Steve Jobs – Co-Founder of Apple Computers.
Elon Musk – co-founder of Paypal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX.
Jeff Bezos – co-founder of Amazon.com
Bill Gates – co-founder of Microsoft.
These men are respected and while all of them have their warts and faults, criticism of them is not described as envy and hatred. What separates them from mitt Romney is that Mitt was a rules manipulator. A legal rules manipulator, because a Rule Lawyer is not a cheater, but not someone who wins the game by being a better player but by knowing the loopholes that allow him to win.
I think Americans have a guttural dislike for this sort of play, in sports, in games, and in business. This is why these attacks are so damaging and will continue to be so for Mitt, it pokes right into our basic ideals of how the game is played.