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" From time to time going forward, we are going to engage, from here in his former and possibly still-temporary home state, in some lovely little flashbacks to earlier moments in the career of Willard Romney, Presumptive Nominee. Today&amp;#039;s lesson in the archaeology of the many Romneys comes from 1994, when the late Senator Edward Kennedy resolved to make Romney a memory in their race for the United States Senate in Massachusetts. Kennedy and his campaign made great use of Romney&amp;#039;s adventures as a vulture capitalist, even going to far as to bring some former employees of Ampad, one of the companies Romney and Bain had looted down to the ground, to Massachusetts in order to dog Romney around the Commonwealth (God save it!) for a while. Fed up, Romney decided that, in a debate on October 25 of that year, he&amp;#039;d point out that the Kennedys weren&amp;#039;t exactly holding bake sales themselves, and that they hadn&amp;#039;t made their particular pile singing in the choir, either. At which point, the Senior Senator laid him out flat: &amp;quot;The Kennedys are not in public service to make money. We have paid too high a price.&amp;quot;   (As a comeback, Romney could only come up with the unique combination of hauteur and whinging that have made him beloved among the politicians of his time: &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s inappropriate when we have to engage in discussions about your personal family history. We all have sympathy for that.&amp;quot; Mighty white of you there, Willard. Who&amp;#039;d a thunk that, 18 years later, we&amp;#039;d have to listen to him complain about all those mean things said about his wife by Hilary Rosen, Warrior Illuminati Queen Of The Left. What a tool.) This all comes up in the midst of a concerted attempt by the president&amp;#039;s campaign to hang Bain Capital&amp;#039;s business practices around Romney&amp;#039;s neck again. It&amp;#039;s certainly worth the effort. Romney&amp;#039;s career in business has not been about creating jobs or destroying jobs. It hasn&amp;#039;t been about jobs at all. It&amp;#039;s been about making boatloads of dough for himself and his investors. Whatever else happens is, quite simply, none of his affair. The line of attack on Romney for what he&amp;#039;s done in business is not to accuse him of greed, it&amp;#039;s to accuse him of having all the human empathy of a brick tossed through a window. If you&amp;#039;re running against Romney, who&amp;#039;s done nothing his entire career except make money for himself and his investors, it is a more obvious strategy today than it was in 1994. More people are out of work longer. And it&amp;#039;s certainly emotionally effective. The problem is that the president goes around the country undermining the strategy by cozying up to the people who are in the same business as Romney is. Ted Kennedy, filthy rich son of a bootlegger pappy, was able to get away with this because he and his brothers could have spent their entire lives chasing tail on Miami Beach and, instead of doing that all the time, they also threw themselves into public service to the point where two of them were shot to death for their trouble. (And let&amp;#039;s be kind to Romney and not mention that, when his war erupted, Jack Kennedy signed up for virtually suicidal PT boat duty while, when his time to be called came, Romney dedicated himself to keeping Provence safe for Mormonism and from the Viet Cong.) So, when Kennedy hooked off the jab in that debate, there was so much emotional power behind it that Romney went down like a sack of meal. The president doesn&amp;#039;t have that option. He needs the money too badly. So, at the same time he&amp;#039;s lining up in his commercials with unemployed steelworkers, he&amp;#039;s raising money from hedge-fund cowboys, and speaking softly about Jamie Dimon and his unfortunate experience at the casino&amp;#039;s $2 billion window. Meanwhile, Steve Rattner, the president&amp;#039;s genius car czar, is calling the ad unfair, and Republicans are pointing out (rightly) that Jonathan Levine, one of the president&amp;#039;s chief bundlers, was actually in charge of Bain when it closed the steel mill in question. Stephanie Cutter of the president&amp;#039;s campaign went on with my man Chuck Todd this morning and floundered pretty badly about all of this. &amp;quot;Jonathan Levine is not running for president,&amp;quot; she said lamely. The only thing that can make the president&amp;#039;s line of attack truly work is that Romney himself behaves like a guy who&amp;#039;d tie Polly to the railroad tracks. He not only was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple, he&amp;#039;s ready to fire the third-base coach for telling him to hold up. Dammit, he should have been born in the dugout, two runs in, and the bases loaded. If the president can get away with sucking up to the financial services industry while casting Romney as that industry&amp;#039;s most destructive product, it will be because Romney can&amp;#039;t help but behave that way. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13993/mitt-romney-bain-capital-record-8868896/>