Gingrich and Bain

The last few election cycles, topped off by the increasingly inane jabber of the folks now running for the Republican nomination for president, have removed all doubt about the veracity of this statement: The job of president, or, for that matter, any other elected office, especially at the federal level, is such a desirable one because of the wealth accumulation that goes with it, that people will do anything, say anything, and pay any price to get it. Still, in the hypocrisy sweepstakes, it seemed like the bar couldn’t be set any lower than it had been in recent months by the GOP candidates.

Wrong. With their ganging up on Mitt Romney for his association with Bain Capital, they’ve knocked it down yet another notch. Particularly so Newt Gingrich, who, in the service of his eye-popping ego and relentless ambition is leading this charge. You don’t have to support candidate Romney and his policy ideas generally (whatever they may be) to bristle at the clueless characterization of Bain – and the more than 2,000 other U.S. companies just like it – as nothing more than a pack of predatory Gordon Gekkos whose mission is to throw hard-working American out of their jobs. For Republicans, of all people, to embrace that characterization is ironclad evidence that this campaign has gone through the looking glass.

The function of Bain and others like it is to invest in companies that have underlying value – good and profitable products and services – but which, due mainly to poor management, have underperformed and are in danger of underperforming themselves right out of business. People – investors – wish to put their money at risk in the belief that such companies can be rehabilitated and that their underlying value can thereby be unlocked. It’s hard to quantify this, but there’s certainly reason to believe that this process is a net job creator, not destroyer. That’s because companies that go belly up throw all of their employees out of work, not just the relatively small number that need to be cut to keep the company in existence and to make it the company it could and should be. That may be a bit of an oversimplification, but what private equity companies like Bain do is one small part of a much larger process of continual corporate endings and beginnings -- of death and renewal -- that keeps the big wheel turning and makes the U.S. economy by some distance the most prolific creator of jobs in the world.

It’s not always easy to tell what Mr. Gingrich does and does not stand for, but historically he has been nothing if not a capitalist, a card-carrying free-enterpriser who therefore understands capitalism’s processes, particularly the ongoing and altogether natural one of corporate birth, life, and death. And so he knows what he is saying about Bain is a crock. And yet he says it anyway.

Now comes the "open marriage" discussion, and there has always been something about Mr. Gingrich's carriage and demeanor that makes the idea that he lobbied for such an arrangement totally plausible. (Predictably, he excoriated "the media" for his own mind-bogglingly self-serving treatment of his several spouses, pronouncing himself "appalled" -- not that he did it or that his ex-wife outed him on it, but that people asked about it.) The man absolutely sets some kind of record for unctuousness -- his pious condemnation of behavior of which he himself is demonstrably guilty, his contemptuous dismissal of indisputable evidence of his post-congress lobbying shenanigans, his exquisitely mindless political/historical disquisitions that reveal him to have much more in common with Professor Irwin Corey than with anyone who has serious ideas about statecraft. And on and on.

It's well understood that most voters favor the candidates they favor not because of what those candidates believe and say but because they "like" them, in much the same way that people "like" movie actors -- what they look like, how they talk, how they present themselves -- the aforementioned carriage and demeanor; and that's why politicians get away with candidacy by bumper sticker. If I "like" you, and your slogans sound about right, then I'm in your camp.

None of which explains the appeal of Newt Gingrich.