The Obama campaign has been targeting Romney viciously and unfairly over the last few weeks over his business career. Should I point out that Obama was a lawyer, which are much more disdained than businessmen? We'll leave that for another time.
Everything about a candidate's past is open to scrutiny. Nobody says that businesspeople are a monolithic mass of interchangeable people. Bankers, theater managers, and advertising executives would fail badly at the specialty of each other.
For good reason attorneys are a disproportionate share of elected officials above a certain level. They are intellectual generalists, arguably the people who specialize later than any other professionals. Sure, there are some sleazy attorneys -- ambulance chasers who gladly accept staged accidents or talk people into going for much more than an insurance company has to offer only to take any additional benefit from a settlement while stringing out a settlement, people who use their legal letterhead for collecting debts, and defense attorneys for career criminals. Add to them those who serve as legal enforcers for Big Business and you see the ones who don't get political careers because such is an economic letdown.
Judges, almost as a rule lawyers, are generally held in high regard.
Turnabout is fair play. Except this time it is on the business record of Mitt Romney -- and entirely so. If he has done horrible things to people while a business executive while enriching himself then he should not complain about the consequences of scrutiny upon his record.
Do you want a good liberal analogy for Mitt Romney? Try John Corzine.
No, his surrogates attack a bad model of capitalism -- a predatory capitalism that finds under-valued assets that underpin a successful business and seizes them for the gain of the predators, squeezes small-scale competition into oblivion, pits worker against worker in a compulsory race to the bottom, pits community against community for tax breaks, and all in all enriches a few at the expense of everyone else. It finds cheaper ways of doing things but passes on none of the benefits to the consumer but finds ways to increase prices (and profit margins).
If the President isn't the spear-point of the attack, his surrogates have the right idea. As I see it the President doesn't so much support 'socialism' as he does competitive capitalism of the sort that we used to know -- the capitalism that gave working people stakes in the system. The road to socialism is through pure plutocracy with a corrupt government as enforcers -- the sort of economic order that suggests that anything would be better as an economic order but a political order that needs the most ruthless revolutionaries to overthrow.
Crazy people can believe anything.
