It's a state bordering on 10 percent unemployment having suffered decades of plant closings at the hands of Wall Street predators. Will South Carolina voters be receptive to the argument by Mitt Romney's GOP rivals New Gingrich and Rick Perry that his record in business as CEO of Bain Capital renders him unelectable?
Here's how Perry put it in a midnight interview with CNN's Piers Morgan:
There is a real difference between a venture capitalist and a vulture capitalist. Venture capitalists are good. They go in, they inject their capital, they create jobs. Bain Capital on the other hand, it appears to me, were vulture capitalists all too often. I don't get confused for a minute that Barack Obama and his team wouldn't attack Mitt Romney on that during a general election on that if he makes it that far. If nothing else we're doing Mitt a favor by exposing him early on so that he can either figure out how to defend that or, more importantly and better from my perspective, he's not the nominee to begin with.
So far Romney has not met the merits of the charge, but instead defended in two ways: By claiming that his rivals are attacking capitalism, and accusing them of joining the Democrats in making these charges.
Given the momentum of his early victories Romney might be able to brush aside Republican foes with such deflection. But at some point he'll need a substantive answer for his record -- and especially for his much maligned claim that he created "100,000" jobs at Bain Capital. Otherwise, this story is his Swift Boat to defeat in November.
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IMPO...............With any luck at all it will go about 3 feet South, thus making it much more "noticeable" to him,
when he goes back to screwing the middle class................
They are doubling down, in a way that puts everybody who is mad at corporate influence, mad about outsourcing, mad about anything in the business world as socialists, OWS, and therefore so far outside the Republican Party that their votes will not be courted at all.
There is a battle for the soul and brand of the Republican Party. The Republicans are rallying around Romney because he is the frontrunner, and they wish to avoid a long drawn out battle that would weaken them for the general election. But energetically associating themselves with Romney could taint (further taint) the entire Republican Party as the party of the 1% and only the 1%.
Romney is a vulture who will help the greedy one percenters pick the middle class to the bone.
I hope the middle class voters in South Carolina stop Romney and his ruthless, rich friends before their feeding frenzy begins.