Passing new regulation in the current dysfunctional political system is extremely difficult. Nothing useful ever gets out of the house, or gets by (the threat of) the senate filibuster. Yet I think that Obama and Harry Reid should start talking about slapping heavy regulations on the private equity industry. This would be good policy and good politics.
It's good policy because it is the right thing to do. These companies produce almost nothing of value. One can argue that they provide funding for companies that need it, but that is very rarely the case, as there are usually better avenues for viable companies. The real goal of these companies is to make their investors wealthy, and if the companies they buy out make it, then that's just a nice bonus. If they don't, then the private equity firms still get their return on investment. While these guys are running the show, it usually means lots of laid off workers (which sometimes is necessary for the business to survive, and sometimes is just a way to lower costs to get better dividend payouts for the equity firm). In a way, these firms are to corporations (including the GOP holy cow, the "small business") what payday lenders are to people who can barely make ends meet.
The good policy is wasted in the political landscape of today. However, it would still be good to take that fight from a policy standpoint, because it educates people about how these firms operate, and how they provide very little real value to society. If the policy change ends up coming a decade or two down the road, then that's still progress.
The political benefit of driving for strong regulation is that if we get republicans and democrats arguing about the merits of the private equity industry, then it gets on people's radar. It means that media will cover it, with the entire spectrum from magazine fluff pieces to in-depth books and documentaries. The more people learn about it, the less they will like it. The less people will like it, the less they will like the already unlikable Mitt Romney, and his rise to fame and fortune on the backs of others. The more people link Mitt Romney's tenure at Bain Capital to Gordon Gecko (look up "greed is good" if you're unfamiliar, and then see the movie), the less the political center is going to consider Romney to be an acceptable candidate to lead the country.
The modern political reality is that every presidential election is going to be reasonably close in terms of the popular vote. The candidates will automatically get 40% of the electorate by party affiliation alone. The rest can be swayed to a greater or lesser extent. What determines elections are turnout of the base and appeal to the center. Romney will not get a great turnout from the traditional GOP base. Attacking the entire industry that created his wealth and "job creating" experience in a way that educates the voting population as much as possible means there will be no need for character assassination and swift boating. Mitt has done it to himself for decades. If the small business owners who usually are automatic GOP voters are so disgusted that they stay home (or stop donating to his campaign), and combine that with the legitimate outrage that the political middle will show when they learn how this industry works, then Romney's campaign will never even have a chance to unseat a president who is in a historically weak position for re-election.
