Romney’s rivals intensify their attacks

What happened

Mitt Romney took a major step toward securing the Republican Party’s nomination for president this week, as he overcame increasingly hostile attacks by his rival candidates to win the New Hampshire primary. With his 16-point victory over second-place finisher Ron Paul, Romney became the first nonincumbent Republican candidate to win both the Iowa and New Hampshire contests. His victory sets up the South Carolina primary, on Jan. 21, as a pivotal contest. Another Romney win would effectively end the race, while rivals Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich all hope to give new life to their campaigns in a state more friendly to Southerners and Christian conservatives. Super PACs supporting Gingrich and Perry plan to spend about $5 million on ads attacking Romney as an unprincipled moderate and corporate raider whose greed cost thousands of middle-class people their jobs. “This will be the last stand for some candidates,” said Republican strategist Adam Temple, “and they will go down fighting.”

The focus of the rivals’ attacks is on Romney’s business career at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he co-founded and ran for 14 years. Gingrich characterized Romney’s work at Bain as buying and “looting” struggling companies, while Perry branded him a “vulture.” Romney accused “desperate Republicans” of undermining the party’s support for free enterprise, and playing into President Obama’s hands. “This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation,” he said. “The country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy.”

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What the editorials said

It will be hard for conservatives to stop Romney now, said The Wall Street Journal. Despite his inability to excite the GOP’s conservative base, his “electability and leadership” have won over a plurality of primary voters, while his opponents have diluted the “non-Romney vote.” Santorum “may have the best remaining chance to build on his social conservative base,” while Gingrich and Perry have only weakened themselves with “crude and damaging” attacks on capitalism worthy of Michael Moore.

But Romney hasn’t been honest about his role at Bain, said The New York Times. He claims he produced a “net gain” of 100,000 jobs and that his business experience qualifies him to be president. But his campaign can’t back up those job-creation numbers. What we do know is that a fifth of the companies Bain took over while he was in charge later went bankrupt, with thousands of workers sent packing. It’s this kind of “leveraged capitalism” that has cost so many Americans their jobs while enriching executives and investors, producing the vast inequality we have today.

What the columnists said

Romney has only himself to blame for the harsh scrutiny of Bain, said Ezra Klein in The Washington Post. He falsely portrayed Bain’s goal as “job creation,” when it was actually “wealth creation” for a small group of super-rich investors. In both the primaries and the general election, Romney will be haunted by “heartrending stories” of people fired from factories and offices while he was in charge—now part of a 28-minute film created by Gingrich supporters.

That should be a concern for Republicans, said Michael A. Walsh in the New York Post. Romney is now the presumptive nominee, and Democrats will already be measuring him up for the “Occupy Wall Street/One Percenter memorial bad guy suit.” That’s one reason “the not-Mitt mood” in conservative circles is intensifying, said Jonah Goldberg in NationalReview.com. Conservatives also find him uninspiring and relentlessly inauthentic; he keeps insisting he’s spent his life as a businessman, for example, when everyone knows he’s been running for office since the 1990s. Many conservatives are holding out hope that Romney’s rivals now win a few primaries, so the GOP can find a better candidate at a brokered convention.

Romney will have to withstand “10 days of hell” in South Carolina, said John Dickerson in Slate.com. He’ll be hoping his record of success will “quell conservative calls for a nominee they can believe in,” but the Republican base may not be ready to settle yet. The Palmetto State will either be “the last stand of the anti-Romney forces, or the place where they turn the tide.”