Oh, Mitt, will you ever cease to
parse?
"I am not going to be the technical divider of what's Wall Street or not. Wall Street is typically thought of as investment banking and banking and we were not an investment bank or a bank. But we were in the financial services sector generally," Romney said. "I am not a Wall Street guy, classically defined, but I am not going to quibble over definitions."
And then Romney proceeded to quibble away:
"I can tell you that I have run four different enterprises in my life. One was a consulting firm, one was a private equity and venture capital firm, one was an Olympics, and the other was a state. And my track record in those places speaks for itself," he said.
Except his record doesn't really speak for itself, at least not literally, because in many cases, his record has gone missing. As governor of Massachusetts, he deleted every email sent by his staff; he's refused to release his income tax returns; and in the same interview in which he claimed he wasn't a Wall Street guy, Romney claimed that Bain Capital hadn't received any funding from investment banks ... without offering any evidence.
"I don't believe any of the funding came from Wall Street, meaning from investment banks or the like," Romney told The Huffington Post on board his campaign bus as he barnstormed this state ahead of next Tuesday's caucuses, which kick off the Republican primary process.
"Our funding came from individuals, and then ultimately we got funding from a church pension fund, endowments -– I think our largest single investor group were endowments, colleges," Romney said. "And then we used those funds to either start businesses, venture capital, or to try and buy businesses in trouble and make them stronger. That's not technically Wall Street, that's not an investment banking function, but it is financial services."
So Mitt Romney wants us to know his business was primarily financed by churches and colleges. If that's true, fair enough, but why is Romney bothering to point this out? Does he believe that businesses that are funded by churches and colleges are more virtuous than ones funded by investment banks? And if it turns out his claim is not true, is Romney inadvertently saying Bain was founded with "dirty" money? I thought Republicans were supposed to be indifferent to this kind of stuff.
But whatever Romney's motivations, there's no evidence for his claim. As HuffPost's Jon Ward reports, a former Bain official said he believed Chase Bank, Banker's Trust and the Bank of Boston all were investors in the firm. Whether there's evidence or not, however, Romney says whatever he thinks he needs to say to win the moment. As with every other aspect of his public life, he's only consistent insofar as he believes consistency will serve his interest. And for the most part, that hasn't been very far at all.