Bain Capitalism 101

At the Wall Street Journal, "How does a rapacious company get repeat business?":

Watching Obama campaign ads or MSNBC, one could easily come to the conclusion that Bain Capital makes money by destroying the companies it owns. So for voters unsure about the business that Mitt Romney founded but still reluctant to trust the financial analysis offered by community organizers, some perspective might be helpful.

The basic Obama-liberal critique goes like this: Bain buys a company, loads it with debt and then sucks out cash before foisting the wounded business upon an unsuspecting buyer or a bankruptcy court. In the risk-taking world of private equity such a scenario can certainly happen, and it's true that Bain likes management fees and dividends as much as the next partnership.

But then how to explain the history of Bain Capital? Mr. Romney started the business in 1984. The company has since bought and sold many businesses and executed thousands of financing transactions....

Learning about Bain successes like Staples or Gartner or Steel Dynamics confirms the logical conclusion that Bain had to be creating value along the way—for investors, for lenders, and that means for workers too.

This is going to be a topic to watch. The left's hypocrisy on the economy is astounding, but the Democrat-Media-Complex will give the administration a pass --- well, excluding some genuinely decent reporters like Ashleigh Banfield who slammed Obama shill Ben LaBolt for that advertising hit piece posted above. That said, Romney's going to need to make the case for the virtues of the free market and the power of private equity to vitalize and invigorate the business sector. I was watching Kim Strassel on yesterday's Journal Editorial Report and that was her argument. The Democrat attacks on the wealthy --- like the Ricketts group --- are purely political and frankly demonic. But to counter this the Romney campaign has to be quick on the air with the corrective messaging. They have to remember that they're running against the media too.