Mitt Romney’s record in the ‘real economy’

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When Mitt Romney announces his job-creation plan in Nevada on Tuesday — a move timed to coincide with President Obama’s proposal two days later — he will be sending a message about far more than his policy positions. What Romney wants voters to see is who he is and what he has done.

As the onetime front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination confronts a new threat from Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Romney is turning more and more to his record as a spectacularly successful turnaround artist in the 1980s and 1990s.

“I have spent most of my life outside of politics, solving real problems in the real economy,” Romney told the Republican National Hispanic Assembly in Tampa on Friday. “My work led me to become deeply involved in helping other businesses, from innovative start-ups to large companies going through tough times. Sometimes I was successful and helped create jobs, other times I wasn’t.”

What Romney rarely brings up, however, is that the corner of the “real economy” where he excelled is a specialized, little-understood world known as private equity. It represents one of the most unsentimental sides of modern capitalism — as Romney’s opponents are sure to point out.

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Another venture into the office-supply business, however, helped derail Romney’s first bid for political office, a 1994 effort to unseat the late senator Edward M. Kennedy.

During that campaign, Romney was trailed by fired union workers, who blamed the shuttering of an Ampad plant in Indiana on the company’s takeover by Bain. Kennedy ran a blistering ad against Romney in which one worker said: “Basically, he cut our throats.” Six years later, Ampad went into bankruptcy, though Bain’s investors had profited handsomely, with a $100 million return on their $5 million investment.

full: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/romneys-record-in-the-real-economy/2011/08/25/gIQArbGM2J_singlePage.html