by CHRISTOPHER BENFEY
Mitt Romney at his house on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, May 2007. PHOTO/Ben Baker/Redux
In the Republican debates, Mitt pretends that his ties to Massachusetts are tenuous. When Rick Perry tries to Pin the Dukakis on Romney (“Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, Mitt”), Romney lamely claims that George W. Bush created more jobs in Texas than Perry. Although Mitt never talks about his own years at Harvard (after graduating from Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, he took joint degrees from the Harvard Law School and the Business School), he accuses Obama of hanging out in the “Harvard faculty lounge.” Mitt’s greatest achievement as governor, the Massachusetts health care system (which passed with Ted Kennedy’s support and two dissenting votes in the state legislature), is now his greatest liability among Republicans, who see it as a stalking horse for “Obamacare.” Mitt now claims it was right for our quirky state but not for the nation. He has yet to explain why.
When Mitt trumpets his experience in American business, he rarely mentions that Bain & Company, the consulting and investment conglomerate in which he amassed his $200 million fortune, is a Boston firm. I was attending graduate school in the Boston area in 1977 when most of the smart graduates from Harvard Business School, including Mitt, seemed to be entering the hot new field of consulting. It wasn’t always clear what such firms did; the mystery was part of their allure. Bain was particularly cultish; according to Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker, it was known as “the KGB of management consulting.” Mitt became adept at the Bain specialty of leveraged buyouts, in which large sums are borrowed to acquire a company whose assets are used as collateral. Subsequent “restructuring”—often including layoffs, as Ted Kennedy pointed out in 1994—is intended to make the company more profitable.
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via CP