NEW HAMPSHIRE — Fact-checkers have played a key role in the controversy over Mitt Romney’s role in outsourcing at Bain Capital, but the way the debate has played out reveals the limitations of the genre.
First, fact-checks sometimes help create controversies that paradoxically increase the attention paid to misleading charges. For this reason, political consultants will sometimes intentionally make misleading claims in order to increase the amount of “earned media” their ads will attract. While we can’t know the intentions of the President or his campaign team, their ads charging Romney with outsourcing at Bain Capital have been shown to be misleading by Factcheck.org and The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, but the debate over the issue has come to dominate the presidential race.
Nonetheless, reporting and commentary on the issue has been more substantive and nuanced than the “he said,” “she said” reporting and armchair punditry that dominated early coverage of Obama’s ads. In particular, reporters are starting to unpack what the New York Times called the “convoluted timeline” of Romney’s departure from Bain, which has been described by Romney, Bain, or Romney surrogates in varying and often contradictory ways. The focus of the coverage has thus shifted from the (in)accuracy of President Obama’s ads attacking Romney to the presumptive GOP nominee’s lack of consistency in describing his role at Bain in the 1999-2002 period.
The media pivot to a focus on Romney was most explicit in a report today by Callum Borchers, a correspondent for The Boston Globe, which is widely read in southern New Hampshire. (The Globe has covered Romney extensively since his days as the governor of the state.) Borchers describes the statement by Romney and his staff that the former Bain Capital CEO was not actively engaged in “day-to-day” management of the firm as a “straw-man” that is not “the real question”:
In recent days, Romney and his defenders have begun to say Romney left his “day-to-day” duties at Bain Capital when he took over the Salt Lake City Olympics in February 1999, seemingly absolving him of responsibility for any bankruptcies, layoffs or offshore outsourcing after 1999 by companies Bain had invested in.
Ed Gillespie, a senior Romney adviser, used the phrase in Sunday talk show appearances on both CNN and NBC.
In an interview Friday on CNN, Romney, himself, referred to a Bain Capital investment prospectus from 2000 that did not list him among 18 “investment professionals responsible for the day-to-day affairs” of Bain Capital funds.
But these statements address only the straw-man attack articulated by former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove— “that [Romney] didn’t take a leave of absence to go run the Olympic Committee and continued to run Bain.”
However, Romney established a much stricter standard of separation when he asserted on his most recent financial disclosure form that he “has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way” since he took over the Olympics.
The real question is not about whether Romney had day-to-day involvement with Bain Capital but about whether he had any involvement at all.
There is no serious debate about whether Romney took a leave of absence to run the Olympics. He did. And there is no serious debate about whether Romney continued to run the day-to-day affairs of Bain Capital. He did not.
Rove and others appear determined to pretend those debates exist because they are easily winnable.
This account ignores the role of the Obama campaign in sparking the controversy by running ads suggesting that Romney directed Bain companies to engage in outsourcing during the period in question. As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait put it in a post before changing his mind about the accuracy of the ads, “Obama isn’t saying Romney’s firm shipped jobs overseas, he’s saying Romney shipped jobs overseas.” Fact-checkers and reporters thus necessarily focused on the question of Romney’s day-to-day involvement with Bain and the firms in question.
The "controversy" over Bain Capital and its "outsourcing" of jobs is a Bright Shiny Object with which the Obama campaign hopes to distract voters from the economic situation and the record of the past three and a half years. Whether it will succeed in distracting voters is unclear, but it has certainly succeeded in distracting the media. Gosh, the media playing the Obama campaign's game--what were the odds?
#1 Posted by RobC, CJR on Tue 17 Jul 2012 at 01:53 PM
It's unfortunate that some people are allowing themselves to get distracted by questions of "when was Mitt in charge-charge of Bain" instead of asking "how does Bain's record define the person who profited the most from it?" It's not like Mitt wants us to go anywhere else for clues and it seems that the danger right now is that the press will inpart to voters the gist that all of the negatives of Romney's Bain record are dismissible since the 'offshore' part is. we saw this with the Killian memo controversy.
(I mean OMFG. Really Jokeline? Obama's Willie goddamn Horton? You are going there, huh?)
Bain was a bad company, indicative of the charecter of the person who owned it. That he refuses to own it now is indicative that even he realizes how his profit-from-the-dismantling-of-the-social-compact makes him look at a candidate for political leadership. He has not had a 'come to Jesus' moment where he rejects the methods used to beggar his neighbors for the benefit of shareholders and management. He has not turned his back on the unpatriotic nature of lower tax levels for higher capital gains and foreign tax shelters (you can profit from a country, but don't expect a contribution back. That's what little people like your secretary is for.) To Mitt Romney, corporations are people, good people, who deserve a political candidate looking out for them: not labor, pensions, and other muckity muck who the great Mitt Romney needs to see under a microscope slide to describe.
That's Romney's Bain record, but that's uncomfortable to discuss, so the political press is going to treat all that negative as dismissible since Bain only started pushing offshoring under the Bush umbrella (that might be an interesting story to tell, what changed in 1999 which made offshoring good practice for Bain?)
So we'll have to look elsewhere?
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 17 Jul 2012 at 03:32 PM
We can go elsewhere:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/mitt-romney-crony-10723178
"In 2002, investigative reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele published a piece in Sports Illustrated exposing in damning detail how, in "saving" the Olympics, Romney and his pet organizing committee kept their friends fat and happy."
Yes we can:
http://m.rollingstone.com/entry/view/id/29473/pn/all/p/0/?KSID=483e27552275ea26113700fc00ca7370
"So Romney did that, and then the next night he went to Montana and he discussed the experience in front of a friendlier audience. And this is what he said:
...
"But I hope people understand this, your friends who like Obamacare, you remind them of this, if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy — more free stuff."
As far as free lunches go, we of course just witnessed the biggest government handout in history, one that Romney himself endorsed. Four and a half trillion dollars in bailout money already disbursed, trillions more still at risk in guarantees and loans, sixteen trillion dollars in emergency lending from the Federal Reserve, two trillion in quantitative easing, etc. etc. All of this money went to Romney's pals in the Wall Street banks that for years helped Romney take over companies with mountains of borrowed cash. Now, after these banks crashed, executives at those same firms used those public funds to pay themselves massive salaries, which is exactly the opposite of "helping those who need help," if you're keeping score.
That set of facts alone made the "free stuff" speech shockingly offensive."
If you have money, he is the best backscratcher you can buy. You and he can make fabulous wealth together. If you don't have money, he will need to see you under a microscope slide to even notice you're there. He's a spaceman orbiting your world, not a part of it.
As I have mentioned many times, I am no fan of Obama and the democrats, but Romney and the republicans are no alternative. A vote for a modern republican is a vote for someone to burn down your house and sell off the ashes.
And in that business, Romney's a specialist.
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 17 Jul 2012 at 03:56 PM
"That he refuses to own it now is indicative that even he realizes how his profit-from-the-dismantling-of-the-social-compact makes him look at a candidate for political leadership."
In this comment here, I got into a discussion of what makes a successful long term business.
The problem with these businesses? They, like the banks before the Glass-Steagal repeal, are boring:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/07/17/broadening-the-bain-focus/
“Troubled” companies have a particular meaning on Wall Street. Sure, sometimes they refer to companies that are just muddled, have over-expanded, and are badly managed. But more often, what they are talking about is companies that do not seem to providing a large enough return to shareholders—a stagnating stock price in particular. But that does not mean a company is “troubled.” It can be quite profitable, have productive and loyal employees, have satisfied customers, and cash on hand.
What players like Bain do is enforce a Wall Street preference. There is a bias against companies that seek a “quiet life.” They are shunned by institutional investors, which depresses stock prices and makes these companies “troubled” in the first place. It isn’t that they are not profitable, but rather than institutional investors don’t like them, and as a result they trade at dramatically lower P/E ratios. Indeed, it isn’t even clear that takeover targets do have weaker stock performance if you look at total returns, including dividends.
Once a company goes public, it is essentially subject to “disciplinary” takeovers if it fails to act in accordance with financial sector preferences. This is often phrased as “poorly performing managers,” but what does that really mean? That is really just about enforcing a certain conventional wisdom about what a company ought to do. But these preferences are socially problematic. Consider some of the things that seem to contribute to being a takeover target: slow growth, stable revenues, cash on hand rather than debt, generous employee compensation, conservatively-funded pension or insurance plans. (Again caveats abound. There is no simply model of predicting takeover targets.)
So, in a sense, Bain, and other buyout specialists, serve to enforce a particular type of corporate behavior that focuses on expansion at the expense of predictability, risk acceptance in terms of contractual obligations to employees, and a ruthless focus on cost controls at the expense of employee loyalty and stability.
As a practical matter, it is not clear that this sort of approach is conducive to more rapid economic growth."
But Bain didn't stand for offshoring until after 1999, so we can dismiss all that other Bain stuff as 'in question' and 'up for debate'.
This 'fact' stuff is really all up to interpretation.
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 17 Jul 2012 at 05:15 PM
"The irony is that many liberals were outraged by PolitiFact’s choice of the Democratic charge that the House GOP budget would “end Medicare” as its so-called 2011 “Lie of the Year.” As Chait wrote at the time, “it’s obviously a question of interpretation, not fact.” The same principle applies to Romney’s responsibility (or lack thereof) for decisions made at Bain during the period when he was technically its owner and CEO but not involved in “day-to-day” management of the firm."
The above is another Brendan Nyhan piece of false equivalence. There's nothing "ironic" about liberals being outraged that PolitiFact chose that Medicare thing as "lie of the year" because most Medicare experts would agree with the Democrats that the Ryan House budget plan WOULD end Medicare, or certainly Medicare as we know it. You could say it's a matter of interpretation but there's much stronger evidence for the Dem's position on that than for PolitiFact's position. The "fact checkers" missed the forest for the trees.
It's the same with the Romney Bain issue. Brendan, Romney was not "technically" the sole owner, president, CEO, and board chairman of Bain who benefited financially from Bain's actions. He was actually and officially the owner, president, etc. Again, the fact checkers missed the forest for the trees in trying to split hairs and say Romney was not responsible.
I issue the same challenge to Brendan Nyhan that I issued to Greg Marx. Ask your mother whether the owner, president, and CEO of a company should be held accountable for what his company does, and please report back to CJR readers.
#5 Posted by Harris Meyer, CJR on Fri 20 Jul 2012 at 02:01 AM