You make a good point, Tommy. 

It CAN be over-stated, because t wasn’t as if The Chicago Killing Machine (the image that comes from that brief Politico comment with quote yesterday) was going to overlook Romney’s time as Bain CC’s Gordon Gekko; but it adds a perhaps quite critical authenticity, perhaps for the few truly independents registered voters who might need some reason to turn out, & certainly for the larger numbers of lean-D & lean-R voters, who need a push one way or the other.

Folks should understand this is not really a NEW issue with Gekko, uh, Mittens: the Boston Globe took quite a long multi-part in-depth view of Mitt’s past in the context of the run-up to the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial race. If you look at that with a skeptic’s eye, it appears that Romney, who not surprisingly, given his family history, was always conscious of the impact of what he was doing at any given moment on his future career in electoral politics, had good reason to be concerned at the time he was asked by Bill Bain to head up the acquisitions arm, concerned enough to have its mandate expanded, for a brief period at the beginning at least, to encompass new ventures, which allowed him the luxury of putting together the capital structure & backing of what became Staples, before going full bore into the brutal world of take-overs & restructures. The reason for that initial caution seems plain enough: by far most corporations in a weak enough position to be taken over were bound to be those with large mature labor & lower-to-mid-level management personnel components TOGETHER with large employee pension fund surpluses, the ‘Romney Model’ being to go before the existing board to promise a superficially big but specific monetary prize to the priority shareholders in exchange for giving Bain CC a free hand in breaking up the components, in firing existing management, in hiring new temporary management with a single goal of instituting the Model to replace the existing management, and to have the new management go to the various collective bargaining representatives of the labor component with the news that their members faced the prospect of choosing between all of them getting fired or some of them being retained for a while so long as they withdrew any objections to the company having access to the employee pension funds to pay for any necessary buy-outs for down-sizing and for re-tooling the company into pieces that would be more attractive for third party purchase.

But the difference is that the TIMES were different: The economy in 2002 was still in the early Bush recession, but that was seen very much as a ‘cyclical’ type recession, not anything as devastating or global as the one that became evidence in 2007 almost 18 months in advance of the September 2008 meltdown under Bush & which Obama inherited 5 months later. The recession we were in 2002 was seen partly as a function of the late fall-out of the bust in the dot-com boom, and as a period of corporate and Wall Street adjustment to the removal of almost all the New Deal era regulatory assurances against bankster-caused recessions, including in particular the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act, by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

More particularly, the economic climate than even allowed for Gordon-Gekko vulture capitalism was pretty much completely gone by the mid-1990s, but it had not entered the public consciousness in anything like the way it has since. Gordon Gekko-type vulture capitalism was an opportunity that was created by the post WWII period of industrial expansion in the US, which by sometime during the Carter administration years was causing obvious difficulties for companies which had made large benefits commitments to employees during the most competitive years, from about 1955 when the big drags of WWII decommissioning, the Marshall Plan, and the Korean War were starting to ease, to about 1970 when the big drags from the Viet Nam started showing serious effects. Anyway, point being that in 2002 folks were not nearly so clear as they are now on HOW & WHY Romney had been able to make a fortune of a quarter billion dollars in less than a decade (in contrast with how folks have become conversant with how George Soros, for example, was able to make a fortune many times larger than that over the course of a single long weekend in speculating on the change-over to the euro in France – largely because Soros went to the financial & political leaders in France & Britain & TOLD them what the problem was & what he would feel compelled to do about it if they did not heed his advice, and because he’s written about exactly what he did then a number of times since, in some serious detail in his various books).

So, what Gingrich has done here is to apply his special ‘genius’ for political dismissals, in offering up the goal of where the Axelrod-Plouffe plan has to be headed if Romney is nominated. In a sense, Gingrich, for self-serving reasons of course, is doing the American people a big favor by turning the most toxic part of Romney’s past into an issue at THIS stage, going into the GOP primary season, rather than leaving it to the Obama machine to expose it later on.

Which is not to say anything at all on what Gingrich is offering up INSTEAD of that quite accurate vision of Gordon Gekko toxicity. 

Look at the way Newt lovingly looks into his eyes…………

http://tinyurl.com/86xfngc

I’m not reading all that sh!t. Cliffs?

Another reason why this is so true http://news.yahoo.com/obama-headed-landslide-094500953.html

Obama should forbid any of his campaign people from making any statements or producing any ads right now.

Typical socialist rant by Gingrich. Romney is our last chance to elect a capitalist.

This just in…CNN reports that either Romney or Gingrich will beat Obama in the 2012 election.  They advised the WH to take Republicans seriously or they will find themselves out of a job.

The Obama Campaign has declared that they want to “Kill Romney” these are the class of folks we are dealing with folks.

How do you type with a strightjacket on?

Newt makes it so easy for the video editors.  Thanks Newt.  

The DNC needs to save its money for now.  The Reublicant Party is imploding all on their own.  Amen.

Yes exactly.  All the more reason to send up a clean candidate.

Itz soo devastating!  Gonna be EPIC!  High fives & butt slaps.

There are THOUSANDS of people who can tell you who Bain Capital threw out of work.  Just ask any former Clear Channel radio employee.  It’s been happening for many, many years.  That’s why whenever Romney says he has a history of creating jobs, his history of ELIMINATING JOBS is greater!  Suck on those FACTS!

That was very funny.  Bravo.

In other words, Newt made the attack that Dems would make if Romney is the nominee. Label him a Wall Street fat-cat, attack his company, and slice and dice his record.

Making that point now, Newt rips a hole in Romney and makes his own nomination that much better.

Thanks. :)

With any luck, President Obama won’t have to worry about running against Mitt Romney, because he will not be the nominee.  As much as I would hate to vote for a member of the American Taliban like Michelle Bachmann or Rick Santorum, I would hold my nose and do it.  If Mitt Romney is nominated I’ll vote 3d party, because he is at least as phony as hopey-changey Himself.  The USA got snookered in 2008; it ain’t gonna happen again.

You take those same words and put them in the President’s mouth and all these insane rodeo clowns on here would be screaming “class warfare” like it was the incantation that would raise the ghost of Ronald Reagan.

you seem like the kind of person who spends their life trying to figure out where the Lucky Charms leprechaun is hiding.

the beauty of the endless debate series – all of their candidates have imploded and given us tons of material for attack ads in the process.