Bumped up to get a wider, non-holiday weekend audience.–Delaware Dem.
WDEL did an interview with John Carney yesterday and they put a snippet of it up on their website. It is worth it to go over there to hear the whole thing. Our lone Representative in the House tries to have it both ways on the critique of Bain Capital and ends up looking pretty insensible in the end.
Here’s a rough transcript of Carney’s soundbite from WDEL:
The vast majority of jobs are created by small businesses, so while critiquing the approach of Governor Romney, we don’t want our constituents — sound like we are anti-business because you have to create conditions where businesses can be successful.
The WDEL piece ends with this:
Carney says the question voters should ask is whether rich investors or blue-collar workers reaped benefits from Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital.
I’ve been thinking about this since I saw it this AM and I can’t quite figure out what he is trying to get to here. The choices are:
- John Carney thinks that we really are that stupid.
- John Carney actually believes this stuff.
Seriously, the vast majority of small businesses are not private equity firms in the bustout business so that their investors can benefit. And if the free market is actually working, it doesn’t need John Carney to create conditions where businesses can be successful. In fact, the market is specifically damaged every time John Carney (and his colleagues to be fair) are providing subsidies and supports to businesses as a way to minimize business risk. None of them have but the mushiest of reasons why we have to accept socialized business risk.
It doesn’t matter though. Bain is a specific type of business (and not small worth a damn), and if you are paying attention to the President, he is specifically calling out the destructive tendencies of the Bains of the world, while their investors make tons of money and the workers at these busted out firms end up with the short end. So if voters are asking themselves about who benefits from the Bain experience, you certainly are not going to have blue collar workers on the winning end. That is something of the business model for Bain and the like, right?
If you are going to triangulate here, Representative Carney, you need to start with understanding the two points you will be triangulating from. Defending Bain as a way to support small businesses is something of an insult to most small businesses and definitely an insult to Delaware voters.