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"\n\nBecause the 2012 election is shaping up as a real shit orgy, odds are we'll see attack infomercials even more brutal than When Mitt Romney Came to Town\u2014put out just after Mitt's New Hampshire win by a Super PAC tied to Newt Gingrich, in case you don't know, and instantly the political world's equivalent of must-see porn. All the same, it's hard to imagine one more destructive.\n\nThat's not so much because of any immediate damage the ad did Romney. Though it certainly hit him in a couple of the many places he lives, his South Carolina poll ratings actually improved during the kerfuffle after its release. The downside for Republicans of When Mitt Romney Came to Town is how memorably it trashed a basic tenet of GOP richonomics. For the past 30 years\u2014really more like 150, but never mind\u2014the Republican mantra has been that capitalism can do no wrong.\n\nSo much for that. Watching the full 28-minute version of WMRCtT, you find yourself thinking, \"What is this\u2014the Socialist Workers' Party's remake of Citizen Kane?\" \"Nothing mattered but greed,\" the narrator intones early on, indicting the \"Wall Street corporate raiders [who] made billions\" from sticking it to the rest of us. America's more sardonic leftists may feel tempted to paraphrase Paul Henreid in Casablanca: \"Welcome to the fight, Mr. Gingrich. Now I know we will win.\"\n\nBain Capital, the investment-services firm Romney co-founded in 1984, rolls through the movie like the Death Star turned bowling ball, smashing up everything it touches for filthy lucre's sake. Interviews with hard-working average Americans on the receiving end\u2014burly Florida guy in Vietnam-vet ball cap, nice mom whose daughter has leukemia, woman who lost her home to foreclosure, and so on\u2014detail how their livelihoods were wrecked by Bain's practice of snapping up companies, gutting them for quick profit and then letting them die on the vine. Intercut with their harrowing tales of woe are clips of a chuckling Mitt spouting callous plutocratisms like, \"For an economy to thrive, there are a lot of people who are going to suffer\" and \"Make a profit! That's the name of the game.\"\n\nFrom the iconic images of heartland vistas turning bleak under ominous skies to the hilarious shot of a winsome tyke looking crushed at the news that Kay-Bee Toys has gone bankrupt on Bain's watch\u2014\"Pop! They shot Freckles,\" as the National Lampoon once immortally put it\u2014Michael Moore himself couldn't have done a more slam-bang job of turning Romney into the free market's predatory answer to Hannibal Lecter. Or, as things turned out, played any more fast and loose with the facts.\n\nSince everyone interested had seen it by then, it cost Gingrich nothing to piously ask his Super PAC to re-edit the thing for factual accuracy once the press tabulated the movie's distortions. Nearly all of the most damning instances featured in it of Bain Capital's nihilistic m.o. took place when Mitt himself was off running the 2002 Winter Olympics\u2014which doesn't mean, presumably, that he didn't get his share of the moolah. Several of the movie's heartland talking heads came forward to protest that their sound bites had been wrenched out of context and that they'd been interviewed under false pretenses; they'd thought they were appearing in a legitimate doc about their economic troubles, not an anti-Romney hit piece. Even the movie's most iconic image, a photo of a grinning Romney apparently getting a shoeshine on an airport tarmac, turned out on closer inspection to show him submitting to a TSA wanding instead. If Mitt's enough of a VIP to get to take his ease in a chair while that's going on, is that really news?\n\nYet none of the misrepresentations\u2014large or small\u2014detracted much from the movie's effectiveness in inflaming negative perceptions of the GOP front-runner. For all his skill at changing his spots, Romney doesn't have much wiggle room when it comes to disproving that he a) really is gross-out rich and b) did indeed make a bundle off the exact kind of financial-sector manipulations that ended up triggering the Great Recession. And then there's c), which is that he's astoundingly tin-eared about the anxieties of Americans less affluent and in the know than he is.\n\nAll these were and are likely Democratic lines of attack on Romney if he does become the nominee. That's why the porn appeal of When Mitt Romney Came to Town isn't in its ruthlessness or even dishonesty. Nope, it's all about who put up the dough and which of Romney's Republican\u2014contemplate that: Republican\u2014rivals hoped to benefit.\n\nNamely, Gingrich and his backers. Nowadays, the latter mainly means casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the moneybags behind the pro-Newt (it's named for one of his idiot books) Winning the Future Super PAC. They were understandably desperate enough to try anything after Gingrich's poor Iowa and New Hampshire showings, but this?\n\nThe thing is, there's a reason none of Romney's other rivals had gone after him over Bain. Doing so implicitly endorses Occupy Wall Street's take on corporate America as a pack of selfish vampires, not the GOP's traditional view. In high gear since Obama took office, the whole Republican strategy has been to deny that the issue of economic privilege has any substance, blame government\u2014never the private sector\u2014for everything going kerflooey in 2008, and fault anyone who says different for lacking patriotism and indulging in \"un-American\" class warfare. Showing off his tin ear in all its glory, Romney himself dismisses any popular dissatisfaction with our current the-rich-get-richer system as the result of \"envy,\" probably not the best way of phrasing things when it defines you as enviable.\n\nSo you can't really blame Rudy Giuliani for sputtering \"What the hell are you doing, Newt?\" on Fox and Friends soon after When Mitt Romney Came to Town went viral. Maybe the younger Gingrich had a rep as a bomb-thrower, but he didn't use to do it in elevators. Besides, even if the bumptious former Speaker of the House did once con Arianna Huffington\u2014that's what she says\u2014into believing he cared about poverty, slamming capitalism's sins against humanity hasn't exactly loomed large in Newt's repertoire.\n\nMore to the point, it would play zero role in his White House priorities, making his opportunism shameless even by his standards (no small claim). The only thing funnier than Newt turning into Emma Goldman was Rick Perry\u2014Rick Perry?!?\u2014trying to hop aboard the bandwagon by denouncing Bain Capital as \"vultures\" who \"eat the carcass\" of troubled companies and \"leave the skeleton.\" When Rick Perry decides an idea is worth stealing, anyone with half a brain would toss it in the garbage ASAP, something Perry himself was busy doing all of 48 hours later.\n\nIn the short term\u2014the only time frame Gingrich's candidacy will ever know\u2014the whole ploy backfired big-time. Yet as Hail Mary passes go, his plunge into heresy wasn't totally demented. What everyone else hoping for the Tea Party's so far nebulous support has overlooked\u2014or more likely, doesn't want to encourage\u2014is that Tea Partiers are almost as mistrustful of big money as their OWS counterparts. That's the reason a few visionaries wondered last year about an alliance between the two.\n\nIf Gingrich's bid to play to this ideologically incoherent\u2014well, duh\u2014but potentially potent estrangement was a bellyflop, one probable explanation is that he's simply too preposterous a spokesman. Taking his own preposterousness into account as a factor in his calculations has never been Newt's strong suit. If Romney does make it to the White House, Gingrich will undoubtedly claim that he did the GOP a favor by toughening up the candidate for the general election. A chastened Perry was already gingerly trying out that line last week.\n\nDoes that mean When Mitt Romney Came to Town will end up as nothing more than a campaign curio? Maybe, but maybe not. In the 1992 Democratic primaries, also-ran Jerry Brown's attacks on Bill Clinton were widely deprecated as the most irresponsible kind of gadfly stuff by party loyalists. Yet they opened up fault lines that ended up dogging Clinton all the way to his impeachment crisis.\n\nBecause Mitt Romney, Evil Corporate Raider, has one disturbing trait in common with Mitt Romney, Flip-Flopping Political Chameleon\u2014soullessness, still a cardinal sin in American politics pretty much across the board\u2014the movie's long-range impact may be in simultaneously crystallizing and expanding on a prior perception of him, as opposed to inventing one from whole cloth. Just ask Richard Nixon how that kind of thing can haunt a whole career. Yep, even after you've made it to the Oval Office.\n\nAnyhow, it's hard not to relish the spectacle of a Republican candidate unleashing\u2014for his own mercenary, me-first, no doubt soon-to-be-recanted reasons\u2014a more vicious assault on Wall Street's values than anything the Democratic National Committee would ever dare put on the air. We all know that, for all sorts of reasons, a phrase as abusive as \"vulture capitalism\" will never cross Barack Obama's lips. But thanks to Gingrich, maybe it won't need to."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/bain-bomb-blew-up-in-newts-face-it-still-worked>