The Albatross Around Romney’s Neck – The Success Of The Government’s Auto Industry Investment . . .Um . . . I Mean . . . “Bailout”
Let Detroit Go Bankrupt, Mitt Romney’s 2008 New York Times Op-Ed attained iconic status lately, and not in a good way. The auto industry renaissance intervened.
Worst of all for Mitt, the government’s investment in the industry worked. Lately, his our year old Op-Ed gets a fair amount of attention by our non-FOX, non-CNN news outlets, mostly in a tone of what the well-bred call sardonic (and what my parents called “smart-mouthed”). Hollywood types say all publicity is good, for Romney, this isn’t.
Why? At least two reasons:
(1) Two nights ago, in Michigan, he was again seriously challenged by the inexplicable and incomprehensible Rick Santorum in the very home of the auto industry, deep in the manufacturing belt. And in his Op-Ed Romney blithely suggested a foreclosure for that great American region, and
(2) Mitt was proved not merely politely incorrect, he was hugely, stunningly w.r.o.n.g about government investment in the industry. It’s success is Romney’s albatross, a political albatross immortalized in Coleridge’s Rime – “with my cross-bow / I shot the albatross.” Romney cannot disown his blunt force approach to the auto industry; it’s there, hung round his neck, for all to see. His three point margin of victory in his home state, the state wherre his ather, George, is beloved, is in all but numeric meaning a loss.
What could have caused such an enormous miscalculation, shooting the auto with his cross-bow? Romney’s hard pull in Michigan, of course, can’t be placed at the door of a four year old opinion piece, yet, in Michigan like nowhere else, it drew attention, it disfigured him. And what chutzpah he displayed – to go so far out on a limb on the New York Times editorial page, for Heaven’s sake. This betrayal must have angered generations of Michigander auto workers’ families who likely don’t recognize him as a son of George Romney. His series of auto industry missteps is particularly curious when the source is a pragmatic and nimble captain of industry and finance who knows the jolly effect of an infusion of cash into an ailing company or industry. He was a Bain Capital man. Ask around.
Romney’s close call in Michigan in many ways is simply understood. Partly due to Santorum’s fatal attraction among non-Detroiters, partly due to Democrats and Independents who voted for Santorum in Michigan’s open primary, n Michigan, though, it was primarily Romney himself. There’s nothing more telling than a near defeat in one’s home state. Cursed by his unconcern for the fate of auto industry workers, that albatross necktie, he managed to captain his ship far too close to the reefs of his home soil.
Simply put, he’s a champion of the 1%ers in a time when they are least admired among most Americans. These modern day no holds barred financiers, who would have allowed auto companies, auto parts suppliers, and other supporting industries to go belly up, would have quickly “Bained” them, purchasing crippled plants and equipment at pennies on a dollar, loading them with debt, then paying themselves and investors super-substantial returns and “management” fees. Having thus advanced capitalism another few miles, they’d have marched on. The shell auto industry they left in their wake might have survived. If so, it would have been despite the myth of “creative destruction,” despite the Bains of the world who would have first, stripped them bare, and then shaved them clean. These are not popular people to champion today. And Romney, as the trite phrase goes, has not a clue. He’s blithely unaware of that hefty albatross.
Of course there’s a finely honed method. How does this high octane capitalism continue to dominate? In a Marietta Journal Online column, Kevin Foley recently penned an exceptional piece that sheds light on these Gordon Gecko corporate raiders. He strips down Bain and their co-cravenists to their skivvies, and throws in Marine Corps haircuts to boot. Here’s an excerpt:
Much has been made of Mitt Romney’s days at the private equity firm Bain Capital, where critics like Rick Perry say Romney was nothing but a “vulture capitalist.”
But Perry isn’t being fair to vultures, scavengers that perform a valuable if repugnant service.
A better analogy for Romney is vampire capitalist. While vultures consume the dead, vampires suck life from the living, and that’s how Romney mostly went about amassing his fortune when he headed Bain.
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)
Romney’s failure, then and now, arises from his sense of “entitlement,” a word universally derided by his own party. Well, past was prologue. During this campaign his performance on the primary trail – his NASCAR team owning pals; his income tax snafus; his “I’m also unemployed”; his “the poor have a safety net” – is nothing but pure Romney. He’s not faking it, although he tries. Mitt’s certainly an inept actor if he’s trying to disguise his nature, appearing as uncomfortable wearing that albatross as he is wearing his blue jeans. All his unfortunate quotes – they’ll live forever – emanate naturally from him, like steam from boiling water. His capitalism is the bare knuckles variety; his relationship to working men and women is as distant as the stars from the earth. He has no telescope. Laissez faire and bare knuckles business and finance is amoral; under its precepts if you win, you are entitled to win. Why? Because you won. Pardon the technical illogic.
So, it seems, the public good be damned. And that public sphere has only the amorphous principles of the “common good” and the “general welfare” to throw in the way of the Romneys of the world. Simple, amorphous, ethical terms born of commonality and community established for the first time during the (other) Great Depression. Today, the battle being fought to keep the common good alive, to nurse back to health the general welfare, is as pivotal a battle – a war – as the revolution of 1861. The pity is that the very people – and their as yet unborn descendants – who have the most to lose by supporting the Romneys of our country support them avidly. They have suffered, indeed, because of it. yet, they are believers. They believe the propaganda that they have themselves to blame for their middling existence. Herman Cain reminded them months ago: “If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself!” The so-called base believe the GOP offers them a path to riches and, most importantly, status. In reality, their heroes of enterprise offer nothing more than a path to low wage slavery.
Mitt Romney’s mistake in 2008 and in 2012 was to pontificate that government investment in vital industries, in infrastructure, in education, in the auto industry, in . . . basically anything, is nearly always doomed to failure. The general welfare, the common good, he asserts can best be worked out by folks like himself, private investors who, despite the mythology, in the real world are driven by short-term financial goals, addicted to cost cutting, and leading a jihad against unions, government, and equity. Indeed, there is some truth to the Republican view. Given the constant obstructionism and continual sniping from GOP operatives and politicians like Romney, government investment in the common good, in service of the general welfare, is fraught with difficulty. With penurious and furious Tea Party adolescents in charge of Congress, for but one example, the general welfare is on life support, and without health insurance.
attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte
in Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916) ed., Bertaut, Jules
Yet, despite these obstrutionist headwinds, our national investment in the auto industry may have averted a regional, if not national, depression; imagine two million more job losses in 2008-2009. That investment is paying off, and being repaid. Other stimulus measures worked as well, although it is commonly believed they did not. On taxes, on social welfare in its broadest sense, on health care, we lost most of the “issue framing” battles, and then, the legislative battles as well, although it is agreed among Republican supporters that Democrats got far more than they deserved.
Lately, though, since the latter part of 2011 when President Obama reasserted himself by unsheathing his sword and throwing away the scabbard, the nation is rebounding. The President is now dealing in hope, backed by the full force of his office and his inner strength, finally released. He’s succeeding. We’re succeeding. Here one sees succcessful state referenda; there one sees citizen’s uniting to defeat draconian ultrasound legislation and voter suppression schemes; over there are hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of petitions to recall the heinous Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker. Even the exuberantly confident John Kasich, Ohio’s GOP Governor, got stunned into uncomfortable silence and uncharacteristic remorse by the failure of his union stripping bill. The people who comprise the concept of the general welfare and understand its necessity awakened. They understand the war being fought quite literally for the more communitarian and equality-based lives they’ve courageously built since the 1930’s, when many still living among us last beat back the atavistic forces of heartless Gilded Age laissez faire. Not since the Civil war have termites endangered our nation’s foundation as they do now.
As for Mitt Romney, his contribution to this American awakening is enormous. He personifies far better than the icon Gordon Gecko the nature of modern capitalism, cool, detached, banal, and reflexive, shorn of a moral compass, and enabled by split second financial transactions. Without that compass, and on a ship where he wears the very albatross around his neck that cursed it, it’s little surprise that Captain of Enterprise Mitt Romney ran aground on the cold shores of his home state tonight.
In his 2008 wrong-way-Corrigan article, Mitt wrote at the outset:
IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.
In light of tomday’s Michigan primary loss it may well be that the Mitt Romney campaign’s “demise will be virtually guaranteed.” But I will not “virtually guarantee” that here, as he did the death of the auto industry in 2008. I don’t have a crystal ball. I do have eyes, though. I see not one, but many, albatross hung around Mitt’s neck. And Romney’s not alone in that.
