Bashing Bain: A Good Idea?

[Geee]

National Review:

The ham-handed attack ads from Obama’s campaign on Mitt Romney’s former firm Bain Capital have drawn a lot of ire from other Democrats — and not only because they were sloppily fact-checked (the ads hit Romney for layoffs that happened long after he left Bain) and because a leading Obama money bundler is a Bain executive himself.

Chiming in with various degrees of disapproval were Newark’s Mayor Cory Booker (who called the attacks “nauseating”), former representative Harold Ford, Obama car czar Steven Rattner, Senator Mark Warner, and former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell.

 

There are other signs of unease among Democratic elites. Contributions to Obama from Silicon Valley and Wall Street have failed to match 2008 numbers.

But what about the voters? Will the Bain ads help Obama? Or could there be some Bain backlash at the polls?

 

 

Start with the fact that class-warfare themes have less appeal than some people think. The last Democrat elected president on a class-warfare platform was Harry Truman in 1948.

One reason is that affluent voters are turned off by demonization of the successful. Back in Truman’s day, affluent voters outside the South voted Republican by huge percentages. There just weren’t enough of them to elect Thomas Dewey.

 

 

Today, there are a lot more affluent people. The 2008 exit poll showed that 26 percent of voters had household incomes over $100,000. Half of them voted for Obama. He needs those votes again.

My hunch is that Obama’s attacks on Bain will strike most affluent voters as off-putting and that Romney’s calm responses will strike them as reassuring. If you want more jobs created, you don’t go around attacking job creators. Most affluent voters believe that free markets, appropriately regulated, tend to produce fair outcomes. They see investors not as vultures but as creators of jobs and promoters of innovation that increase national productivity and improve the lot of everyone. They see class warfare as an attack on themselves.