-
The Religion of Peace Strikes London Again
May 22, 2013 | 1 comment
-
Carney Goes Birther on Major Garrett
May 22, 2013 | 7 comments
-
Ray Manzarek, R.I.P.
May 20, 2013 | 1 comment
-
Thoughts on The Tornado in Moore, Oklahoma
May 20, 2013 | 1 comment
-
Alan O’Day, R.I.P.
May 20, 2013 | 3 comments
The Spectacle Blog
Jeff Lord takes Rick Santorum to task for criticizing Mitt Romney’s public speaking fees and characterized Santorum’s criticism as stepping into the “I-hate-capitalism cow pie.”
I disagree. To start with, let’s stop equating criticism of Romney with anti-capitalism. Santorum’s criticism of Romney’s public speaking fees is no more anti-capitalist than when people complain about the salaries of baseball players.
Case in point. Last September, when the New York Yankees clinched the American League East, I wrote a blog post praising them for doing it at a bargain:
Then let’s also consider the players who were developed in the Yankees organization who have also made significant contributions to the team this season and aren’t millionaires. Ivan Nova has become the Yankees number two starting pitcher with a 16-4 record with a respectable 3.62 ERA. Nova earned a modest $432,900.
Well, one reader took exception to that last sentence:
Only a guy who makes his living as a poltiical commentator and writer would think that Ivan Nova’s salary of $432,900.00 for playing Baseball in taxpayer subsidized stadiums in the middle of the country’s worst recession since 1930 is a modest amount of money!
No wonder people don’t think that Republicans are serious about fixing the economy!
Get back to your real job Aaron!
To which I retorted, “In comparison to C.C. Sabathia’s $23 million a season, Nova’s $432,900 is a modest amount of money.”
So in the grand scheme of things, the $362,000 Romney earned in public speaking fees represents a very small portion of his fortune and, as Jeff points out (via Rush Limbaugh) is paltry in comparison to the $82 million Bill Clinton has earned in public speaking fees. In fact, you could say that in the world of public speaking, Romney is to Clinton what Nova is to fellow Yankees starter A.J. Burnett (who is entering the fourth year of a five year contract worth $82.5 million.)
On the other hand, to most people, $362,000 is not a small amount of money. The median household income in the U.S. last year was $49,445. It would take more than seven years for a household earning the median income to earn what Romney earned in public speaking fees. For most Americans, $362,000 would represent a vast fortune beyond their wildest imaginations. The fact that Romney can casually state that $362,000 amounts to “not very much” illustrates the gap between his own good fortune and a critical mass of the electorate struggling to make ends meet. As I stated in yesterday’s article:
Romney has no idea what it is to worry about money and so long as he remains insulated from the real world he stands little chance of being elected President.
With that said, I think Romney has less in common with Ivan Nova than he does with the late George Steinbrenner. Both men enjoyed firing people who provided services to them. The only difference was that Steinbrenner rehired the people he fired only to fire them again.
View all comments (11) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by Aaron Goldstein
http://spectator.org/blog/2012/01/19/criticizing-romney-isnt-anti-c
Follow us:
ADVERTISEMENT
SPONSORED LINKS
FLASHBACK TO: 1995
-
Pope Culture
A man of faith in a godless age is hitting Americans where it hurts.
-
Why the GOP Does Not, Like, Totally Suck
Mr. and Mrs. American Spectator Reader, let P.J. O’Rourke talk sense to your kids.
-
Dames at Sea
-
In the Absence of Guns
In Britain, defending your property can get you life.
-
The Metaphysical Martini
-
Counting the Costs of Clintonism
The debacle of this president’s administration is both a cause and a symptom of the decline of American values. Unless Congress impeaches him, that decline will go on unchecked. An eminent jurist surveys the damage and assesses the chances for the recovery of our culture.
-
Chuck McHagel
It won’t take long for conservatives to scratch this presidential wannabe off their 2008 scorecard.
-
The Legacy of Old John and Mother Fresh-Roasted
-
It’s the Best Time of the Year
The American Christmas, like the songs that celebrate it, makes room for everybody under the rainbow. Is that why so many people seem to be hostile to it?
-
The Bush Crack-Up
Was the President done in by the economy, or by the politics of the economy?
Clip of the Day
ADVERTISEMENT
Dai Alanye | 1.19.12 @ 10:38AM
Romney's casually treatment of his speaking fees was either an attempt to diminish their importance or another case of his lack of the common touch. If the former, no biggie, but the latter has given him trouble time and again. It's a serious weakness, and one key to his relative unpopularity.
Oldefarte| 1.19.12 @ 10:46AM
'.... Strongest case against Romney a few sheets short of a reamby Ann Coulter (more by this author)Posted 01/18/2012 ET
Updated 01/18/2012 ET
Mitt Romney has spent more than 20 years in private enterprise, making thousands of business decisions affecting hundreds of companies that led to more than 100,000 new jobs and billions of dollars for employees and investors. So you can see why the left despises him.
Among Romney's thousands of business decisions, the one I gather his opponents consider his absolute worst was the decision to close a paper plant in Marion, Ind. Which wasn't his decision at all.
It was labor trouble at the Marion plant of a Bain-acquired company, Ampad, that formed the basis of Teddy Kennedy's desperate 11th-hour attack on Romney in their 1994 Senate competition. Plant worker Randy Johnson was featured in Kennedy campaign commercials against Romney and disgruntled workers were lavished with Dickensian lachrymosity in The Boston Globe.
In the current presidential campaign, Democrats -- and some Republicans -- have returned to Ampad and the Marion plant as their case in chief against Romney.
The "King of Bain" movie that a pro-Newt Gingrich super-pac just bought with money donated by a gambling magnate cites only one company closed by Bain when Romney was even there.
Guess which one? That's right: Ampad.
The Democratic National Committee has retained Johnson to go on tour in order to more fulsomely describe the horrors perpetrated by Bain Capital on workers at that plant. As salt-of-the-earth Johnson explains, he lost his job at Ampad because Romney "didn't care about the worker."
It is beyond journalistic malpractice for media outlets showcasing the bitter and lying Johnson to neglect to mention that he was the union president who led the strike that forced Ampad to close the plant.
And yet The New York Times, MSNBC and others who have publicized Johnson's sob story regularly refuse to convey that crucial fact. This would be as if a judge excluded the fact that the defense's principal witness is the defendant's mother.
By 1994, the unionized Marion plant was becoming a losing operation to every company that owned it. It was a paper plant, and in the early 1990s, the paper business was beginning to go the way of the buggy whip, as the world became computerized.
(Randy Johnson suffered? Paper magnate Peter Brandt nearly lost Stephanie Seymour over the collapse of the paper market.)
Bain Capital specialized in rescuing troubled companies, so in 1992, it bought the faltering paper-based office products business, Ampad, from the Mead paper company. Far from shutting down Ampad, Bain started buying up more firms in the industry to add to Ampad's portfolio, hoping to create efficiencies and synergies.
In July 1994, Bain-controlled Ampad bought Smith-Corona's struggling paper business -- home to the famed Marion plant.
(Despite shedding its paper business, Smith-Corona went bankrupt the next year. Nobody uses typewriters anymore. Ironically, a century earlier, people said Smith-Corona typewriters would never replace the pen. They probably railed against Smith-Corona as "vulture capitalists" destroying the pen industry.)
Seeking to succeed where Smith-Corona had failed, Bain's Ampad sought to renegotiate a suicide pact-union contract at the Marion plant. But instead of renegotiating, union president Randy Johnson thought it would be a great idea to immediately go on strike.
As long as the nation is still in the fifth stage of grief over Steve Jobs' death, with gushing tributes to his contributions to our wonderful new world of computerized books, letters, memos, newspapers, CDs and classified ads, ask yourselves: Would the mid-1990s have been a good time for workers in an industry made vulnerable by the new, paperless information age to stage a long, acrimonious strike?
Union president Randy Johnson thought it was. The Democrats (and some Republicans) apparently do, too.
Romney wasn't even at Bain during Ampad's acquisition of the Smith-Corona business, much less for the strike at the Marion plant. He was on a leave of absence from Bain to run against Sen. Ted Kennedy. Nonetheless, a dozen workers fired from Ampad's Marion plant showed up in Massachusetts to bird-dog Romney in the final months of his campaign.
It worked. Romney's lead disappeared and, after celebrating with a few cocktails, Kennedy returned to the Senate to continue wrecking the country.
About six months later, Ampad closed the Marion plant for good. As Ampad's president, Charles Hanson, explained at the time, the company had "sustained severe economic damage as a result of our inability to manufacture products at our Marion plant." Apparently, the only thing this ruthless capitalist lackey cared about was that the factory actually produce product!
In any event, it's highly unlikely that Bain would have anything to do with a day-to-day management decision to close a plant, anyway.
Bain led Ampad to thrive over the next few years, buying up more companies in 1995, hiring more workers and making investors nearly $100 million. By 1996, Ampad was being described in Chief Executive magazine as "a stronger, profitable competitor in a consolidating -- and reviving -- domestic industry."
Alas, people kept using those damn computers and shopping for discount paper at Staples and similar stores, and in 1999, Ampad had to file for bankruptcy protection.
Contrary to every single news report on Bain's involvement with Ampad, Bain did not drive the company to bankruptcy by looting it. To the contrary, Bain built up the company, added other companies to it, turned it into a "profitable competitor" that paid handsome dividends for a few years. (And by the way, the company would have gone bankrupt a lot sooner if it hadn't closed down the non-producing Marion plant.)
But in the end, that wasn't enough.
If years of furious acquisition, followed by bankruptcy nearly a decade later had been Bain's secret plan all along, Bain would be the most ham-fisted looter in history.
Politicians' morbid fear of technological advances in the free market has real-world consequences. You will recall that the mainstream media-adored FBI agent Colleen Rowley's main indictment of the bureau after 9/11 was that the FBI had really old computers, preventing it from anticipating the greatest terrorist attack in world history.
In response to Rowley's charges, for example, the Times' Maureen Dowd denounced federal law enforcement agencies for being "antiquated," "inept" and "bloated." (She also said: "I want to see some agents lose their jobs." Maureen Dowd: Inadvertent Romney Supporter.)
Of course, if the Democrats, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry were running things, the FBI would still be using paper and pens -- maybe quill pens -- all in order to save Randy Johnson's union job! Instead of a Xerox machine, they'd have a monk in the back room creating copies of documents by hand so as not to be accused of "vulture capitalism" for eliminating the monk's job.
I don't know how Mitt Romney is supposed to explain free market capitalism to career politicians, much less describe the intricacies of a thousand business decisions in two minutes during a debate.
But we know that Bain's acquisition of Ampad is the left's best shot against Romney's business career. We may presume they don't have anything better, or we'd be hearing about it.
The anti-Romney hysterics don't get to come back later with another company allegedly looted by Bain that I'll have to spend another week researching. Henceforth, I shall refer you back to the Ampad example -- their smoking gun -- which, as we have seen, is not even a water pistol.....'
JmsA| 1.19.12 @ 10:52AM
In case anyone cares, in the previous three election cycles, Bain employees, particularly senior executives have given Democratic candidates and party committees in excess of 1.2 million dollars. On the other hand, the Republican candidates and committees raised more than 480,000 dollars from Bain senior executives.
Bo Darville| 1.19.12 @ 11:03AM
Good grief. If we're peddling the same subjectivist clap-trap about personal narratives of politicians as the left wing morons, we've already lost. Evidently our only chance is if we somehow find a homeless, disabled, homosexual vet who's also an evangelical. Pi Jesu!
FeFe| 1.19.12 @ 12:15PM
Quite right. One need not have Mr. Santorum point out the obvious. The fact Mr. Romney considers his speaking fees as disposable income is a boon for his family and a testament to the cultural inheritance prosperity of America's founding principles but his articulation as such reveals not just an absence of pity for widows and orphans, among whom such sums would induce one to weep, but the typical soul's hard labor endured to achieve not elevated sums of cash but such monetary security for their family. Mr. Plastic.
As for former president Bill Clinton's speaking fees earnings, if one doesn't know he hums the Oscar winning rap song "It's hard out here for a pimp..." by now, then you haven't been paying attention to the Democratic theft propagandized as compassionate redistribution to the tune of a $15 trillion debt, suckers.
dave| 1.19.12 @ 12:27PM
"romney has no idea what it is like to worry about money"? you are totally wrong there, and offer nothing to support such a lame conclusion.
Rivenburg| 1.19.12 @ 8:18PM
romney isnt supposed to win, just be a stuffed suit for the 0 re-election. GOP Ubers making more money this, selling out. it's like watching a don king fight in the 90's. he owns both fighters.
ayrnieu| 1.19.12 @ 8:46PM
You keep posting this same complaint, but what people are equating with anticapitalism is 'anticapitalism', not 'any attack on Romney'. You already revealed your own sympathies when you wondered what'd happened to "Two Cheers for Capitalism". Whatever anyone thinks of that (Romney supporters will have to get their scorn past Romney's plans for China), you don't persuade anyone to your position when you pretend that they're being insincere.
rmws1982 | 1.20.12 @ 12:51AM
The problem is that he criticize Bain for a normal and natural role in a market economy
http://www.examiner.com/bloomi.....om-feeders
carol| 1.20.12 @ 8:36PM
Aaron, No matter what you say or how you say it
you won't win. Our economy is failing fast, our
president is a B.S. Scholar and Romney is the only
chance this nation has of getting back on it's feet.
So rag on if you must but your tongue won't stop
the B.S. Scholar from destroying us from the inside out. Personally I think all professional athletes are over payed and over worshiped. We
need serious patriots in office not the blood sucking leeches we hear every day about. When moral ethics went out the door so did human decentsy. Romney is merely a mortal like all the rest, BUT he believes in the goodness of the American People and their great potential and example to the rest of the world. Give peace a chance won't you.
1389AD | 1.22.12 @ 10:46PM
Mittens thought he could buy the presidency. He has already bought himself some endorsements from various political prostitutes. He's corrupt.
http://1389blog.com/2012/01/22.....s-corrupt/