Opinions

You know your campaign has blown it when your opponent runs a campaign ad featuring your supporters blasting one of your major lines of attack:

Brutal.

Mitt Romney is doing this, one can surmise, for multiple reasons. First, it makes President Obama look foolish, and may give big Obama donors even more doubts about supporting him. Second, if Romney can disable a central argument against him — he’s for some form of capitalism that doesn’t employ anyone and steals from the poor — he is freed to use his “I understand business and you don’t” line with impunity. Finally, it’s an invitation to Democrats like Cory Booker and Harold Ford, Jr., urban and suburban voters who aren’t inherently anti-business. In other words, “It’s okay to dump Obama — even his supporters know his rhetoric is garbage.”

Given current polling, it is not surprising that Democrats in Wisconsin are freaking out. The Wall Street Journal reports: “With little more than two weeks until Wisconsin’s gubernatorial recall election, some Democratic and union officials quietly are expressing fears that they have picked a fight they won’t win and that could leave lingering injuries.” No one is bothering to claim a Scott Walker victory would be insignificant:

The election has taken on significance beyond Wisconsin state politics: Organized labor sees the battle as a major stand against GOP efforts to scale back collective-bargaining rights for public-sector workers, as Mr. Walker did after taking office in 2011. Some Democrats now fear mobilizing Republicans to battle the recall could carry over to help the party — and Republican Mitt Romney — in November’s presidential election. . . .

For the left-leaning groups that have spent months trying to oust Mr. Walker, a loss would be a deflating end to a process that began with unions and their allies gathering more than 900,000 signatures to force a recall.

From the start, some in the Democratic Party worried that a Wisconsin recall could drain needed resources, fire up the conservative base and ultimately make it more difficult for Mr. Obama to win the state.

As you might expect, the finger-pointing is well underway on the side that is likely to lose. (“Top Democrats now say that when labor groups first raised the specter of a recall, the party’s officials urged their allies in Wisconsin to reconsider.”)

One aspect of the New York Times’ blockbuster on President Obama’s bugging out (personally and as a policy matter) from Afghanistan has caught critics’ attention. Max Boot writes:

The critical decisions about drawing down troops — with 32,000 departing by the end of September 2012 — were apparently made by political aides in the White House without consulting General Petraeus in Afghanistan or other generals or, until the very end, Secretary of Defense Gates and Secretary of State Clinton.

This is breathtaking. Commanders on the ground and senior officials at the Department of Defense are not always right, and their recommendations do not always have to be followed by a president. But the commander-in-chief at least has an obligation to solicit their views and take them into careful consideration. Apparently Obama didn’t do that because he wanted to avoid the leaks that attended his previous decision-making process on Afghanistan in the fall of 2009. So he decided to end the surge in September 2012, which [New York Times reporter David] Sanger erroneously describes as “after the summer fighting season” (the fighting season actually lasts until late October or early November) and accurately describes as “before the election.” Meaning, of course, our presidential election.

This confirms the worst suspicions of Obama’s critics — namely that he was never committed to victory in Afghanistan and was instead committed to bringing troops home early so as to position himself advantageously for his own reelection.

It is not a matter of the president’s authority or obligation to make decisions regarding war strategy; That’s his constitutional mandate. But it is nevertheless revealing that he doesn’t care what the military has to say.

The economic recovery, or the lack thereof, is the central topic for the election. Liberals like my colleague E.J. Dionne posit that this is “a distinction between the capitalist we typically honor who comes up with a good product and hires people to make and market it; and another kind who takes over a company, pulls out all the cash he can, and then abandons it to die?” But this is a straw man worthy of President Obama.

As I and many, many others have written, the Newt Gingrich-David Axelrod cartoon bears no resemblance to the particulars of Bain or the private equity markets more generally. It is simplistic and ultimately misleading to suggest that someone comes up with a good product and hires people without any need for investors and ready access to capital.

E.J. argues:

This leads naturally to the question of how creative the destruction wrought by our current brand of capitalism actually is. Since the dawn of the leveraged buyout era three decades ago, many friends of capitalism have questioned whether loading companies with debt as part of these deals is good for companies and for the economy as a whole.

Does this approach cause unnecessary suffering among the employees of the companies in question and the communities that often lose plants and jobs as a result? Sucking pension and health funds dry to aggrandize investors seems less like a creative act than a betrayal of workers who made bargains with their employers in good faith.

But this “brand” of capitalism is capitalism, and in its undiluted state does create hardship, but nothing in comparison to the amount of suffering inherent in other, less successful economic models. Two points should be kept in mind. First, we don’t have undiluted capitalism precisely because, while capitalism is the greatest wealth-creator the world has ever known (I think Obama even said this), we don’t as a compassionate society want undue suffering in the short term. Hence, we have unemployment insurance and an array of social safety-net programs.

Second, capitalism is unmatched in its ability to lift and keep people out of poverty. (On this topic I would heartily recommend “Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism” by Peter Wehner and Arthur Brooks, as well as Brooks’s new book, “The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise.”) Brooks makes the case succinctly:

More specifically on Bain, The Post editorial board wrote in January:

Readers had a plethora of suggestions for a dark horse vice presidential pick for Mitt Romney. Names mentioned included Sens. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), as well as former secretary of state Condi Rice, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. But the person, interestingly, whom readers named most frequently was Puerto Rican Gov. Luis Fortuno.

Statist Quo writes: