Editor’s Note: Seems to Me column was inadvertently left out of last weeks print edition of The Journal. The opinion column appears weekly in the print edition and online. Look for it each week to see what Stan has on his mind!
By Stan Welch – Sometimes, it takes me a while to put my finger on something I have been trying to figure out . I’ll drag it around and think about it and worry over it, and then bam! It comes to me. I’m a little embarrassed that this latest revelation took so long, since I feel sure a lot of other folks have already figured it out.
What had been bothering me is the constant reference to Mitt Romney’s involvement with Bain Capital, the venture capital company he founded and grew rich off of. Based on the wealth the company brought Romney, it was and is phenomenally successful.
What the company did was buy other companies or start companies and try and make them profitable. Some of their successes are Staples, which employs 90,000 people in some 2000 stores and NetFlix, the video rental giant. Other corporations suffered job losses as part of the restructuring that eventually led to either their success or eventual failure.
Romney, who risked his own money, became quite wealthy as a result of Bain Capital’s performance. What had been puzzling me was why the President and his supporters had questioned Romney’s involvement and success. Then suddenly is hit me. They resented the fact that he actually did what he did to become rich. Wealth was his goal when he began, and he dared attain it! His motives weren’t pure enough for them.
The fact that he worked for three years to salvage the Salt Lake City Olympics without pay, and served as Governor of Massachusetts without pay, that he donated his inheritance to his church and made his own fortune – none of that mattered. He dared pursue wealth for its own value. And to make it worse, the sonuvagun refuses to apologize for being wealthy. He actually thinks he is entitled to the fruits of his labors.
Now, I know that people lost jobs as result of business decisions Romney and others at Bain Capital made. Hey, several hundred workers at the Georgetown steel mill were laid off. It hurt and it hurt bad. But the union voted to make some concessions on pay, and management made some concessions on hours and benefits. And last year, after about fifteen months of being closed, the steel mill is open.
How many jobs were lost across the South in the textile industry when NAFTA was passed? How many Democrats voted for that? And Republicans too – they get no free pass from me. Have any of those mills re-opened?
What stuns me is that there is a significant portion of the American population that thinks candidates and elected officials should be judged on their motives, instead of their actions. Not surprisingly, they feel that way only about those candidates and officials they oppose. No one seems to be asking about George Soros’s motives, or Warren Buffett’s.
Personally, I don’t care why Obama wants to make government bigger. I just know we can’t afford it. Is he a socialist? I don’t care. Is he intent on creating some new world order and making America subject to external authority? I don’t care. I just know this nation can’t continue along this path and survive.
I need not concern myself with his motives – his intentions concern me enough. Thwarting those intentions is the key, not understanding the motives behind them. When he is reduced to planning his presidential library, his motives won’t mean diddly squat, will they?
I don’t care what Romney’s motives are either. He has shown that he knows how to make hard decisions and that he is willing to inflict pain on the patient in order to save the patient. Right now, our obese bloated federal government is in need of some painful treatment.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker applied the tourniquet. Now its time to prep the patient for surgery, because it seems to me we’ve got some cutting to do. And Mitt Romney should be scrubbing up right about now.
