Thus far, Mitt Romney's only defense of his Bain Capital record
is to accuse his critics of socialism and communism.
Given that Mitt Romney has repeatedly based the entire rationale for his presidential candidacy on his experience at Bain Capital,
these numbers from the latest ABC/
Washington Post poll are terrible:
Overall, do you have a favorable or unfavorable impression of Romney’s work buying and restructuring companies before he went into politics?
All: 35 favorable, 40 unfavorable (net -5)
Dem: 18 favorable, 60 unfavorable (net -42)
Ind: 36 favorable, 37 unfavorable (net -1)
Rep: 60 favorable, 22 unfavorable (net +38)
Both the Romney and Obama campaigns have work to do in defining Romney's experience: 25 percent have no opinion, including 27 percent of independents. Romney would love nothing more than to continue defending his record by accusing his critics of attacking free enterprise, but at some point he's going to need to get specific on how it is that he managed to make so much money while bankrupting companies. Everybody knows that sometimes companies fail, but the question Mitt Romney needs to answer is how he managed to get paid so much money even when they did fail.
The problem for him is that once he starts answering that question, each answer will prompt a new round of questions. It'll be just like his tax returns: now that he's released one year, he doesn't have a strong case against releasing every year back to 2000, like President Obama has. And the one year that he has released has raised questions about whether he paid any capital gains taxes at all in 2009, and whether he has had other foreign accounts in previous years that he still hasn't disclosed. The same sorts of questions will come up when he finally starts answering questions about Bain Capital, and given that he hasn't been willing to answer them so far, it's a fair bet that the answers won't be pretty.
8:19 AM PT: Greg Sargent reports both blue-collar whites (35-38) and moderates (32-39) have a negative view of Romney's Bain record.