Obama's Bain Attacks May be Helping Romney

Barack Obama has staked his reelection campaign on demonizing Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, a private equity firm he founded. His campaign has spent tens of millions of dollars accusing Romney of closing factories, laying-off workers and shipping jobs overseas. Obama’s ads have portrayed Romney as someone who was comfortable slashing a company’s spending to return it to profit and, ultimately, reap millions of dollars for himself as the company thrived. Which, it appears, are exactly the qualities Americans are looking for to deal with our own economic crisis. 

It has the makings of the most spectacular political backfire in history. 

Today, USA Today/Gallup released a poll of adults which found that, by more than 2-1, 63%-29%, voters felt Romney’s tenure at Bain would cause him to make good decisions about turning around the economy and creating jobs. 61% of adults felt that government was doing too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses.  The poll also found that Romney was viewed as better able to control government spending. 

All this reminding voters what a “ruthless” businessman Romney was may instead be telling them that he is the type of person we need as the economy teeters towards another recession. Americans aren’t the economic lemmings the left and media think they are. They understand that sometimes, in both business and government, you need an adult to make tough, painful, decisions that can restore the path to recovery. Americans understand that, yes, sometimes a factory has to close or people have to lose their job to ensure that the overall business survives and can once again thrive. 

Hell, to many voters, the whole close-factories-and-lay-off-workers mentality may be the exactly perfect qualification to head up the federal government. 

In the Obama campaign playbook, after an avalanche of negative ads, 63% of adults should not be thinking that Romney’s tenure at Bain will help him make better decisions on the economy. The media can spin this all they want, but that is a campaign failure of epic proportions. 

American’s anxiety over the economy is only going to increase in the coming months. We won’t be in an official recession before the election, because there are only a few months left before voting begins and you need two consecutive quarters of negative growth to trigger the recession label. But, for many Americans, the official designation of a recession won’t matter, as they are feeling it already. 

The Obama campaign will continue to scream that Romney is an extremely successful, very wealthy businessman. The American public looks set to respond, “Yes. Bring it on.”

Follow me on twitter here.