Mitt Romney spent many years building a company that used other people's money to buy companies that were in trouble, and "harvest" them, with the aim of making a pile of dough monetizing their unrealized assets and fobbing off their liabilities on others.
He isn't the only one, nor the most successful person to do this. Its been a pattern in American business for decades. Leveraged buy-outs.
And he did well at it, and in this campaign we can see why.
Romney is at his most spirited and convincing when he is pitching his ability to turn a toad (change the middle two letters as you wish) into a nugget, which is what he pitched to investors in Bain's acquisitions, and what he has been pitching in this campaign. Details don't matter. Strategies don't matter. What matters is that Mitt has done this many times before, and he knows that, given any acquisition of a distressed organization, he can make money.
And that's what he's been telling the American people -- he knows what to do with a distressed organization, and will succeed. Don't bother him with facts, with reservations, with roadblocks -- he has faced that before and overcome them. So when he says he won't raise the deficit his proof is just his saying so. Because his goals are clear and his abilities are limitless.
Don't talk to him about consequences, or people who are crushed in the process, because in his view, that doesn't matter, since the end result is what he is after -- more money, regardless of the impact.
Its the basic reason why he is not qualified to be President. And why his running mate is not qualified to succeed him, God forbid. Ryan doesn't understand how poverty hapens. Romney doesn't understand the fundamental differences between running the executive branch of the government beholden to all the people, and running a private company beholden to noone but himself and his investors.
Its why he doesn't consider that his lies are lies. Executives like Romney view public utterances as part of the marketing, sales and publicity of their companies, or another means to manage and encourage and focus their employees and contractors. Everything is fluid, nothing is fixed, what matetrs is what are the best words for the situation as it stands today.
How Romney characterizes Obama is precisely how he would have spoken about Steve Jobs if he was trying to buy Apple, or Bill Gates were he going after Microsoft. Whatever they did in the past, he would claim that noone could do better than him in the future.
We're not talking intellectual evolution or policy evolution or change of thinking based on experience. Romney's attitude to himself, what he knows, and his unlimited confidence in his ability to succeed, so long as he doesn't have to be held to any of his commitments is what is at the core of the man, if you can call that a core at all.
Words are tools to him, not embodiments of policies, promises, commitments. Everything is malelable to Romney, whether it impacts the lives of our troops in war, the health of our children, or the safety of our environment. The first question to ask about anything he says is: how is this going to help Mitt?
jc
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