The Guy Who Fires You: What voters really think about Romney’s wealth
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Randy Lavallee is a proud member of the American working class. A New Hampshire resident, he works as a calibration inspector for a jet-engine plant just across the state line in Maine. Four years ago, the plant went through a downsizing that resulted in the layoffs of one-sixth of its 1,600 workers. After the cuts, Lavallee told me, the “CEO and management got big bonuses.”
I met Lavallee, 58, recently in Rochester, New Hampshire, where he lives. A registered Democrat who sometimes votes Republican in presidential races, he is exactly the kind of swing voter who will decide this November’s election. Moreover, given his recent workplace experience, he is exactly the kind of voter who should be receptive to attacks on Mitt Romney’s business history—namely, the layoffs he presided over at Bain Capital. So what, I wondered, did Lavallee think of Romney’s business record? When I asked, he just laughed. “I’d like to have his success,” he said. “I’m just not as ambitious as he is.” But what about the layoffs that followed many of Bain’s deals, even as Romney and his colleagues made big profits? “That’s just how business works. Would I like it if my business shut down? No. But that’s what businesses sometimes need to do.”
A few days later, I called Lavallee back and pressed further, but he held firm. “He’s a businessman, and, if I was a businessman, that’s what I’d do. I’d be in business to make money for me and my company,” he said. I was curious if he knew what Romney’s business involved. “Just from watching TV, it looks like his company would purchase other companies that were going bankrupt, reorganize them, get rid of what’s not needed, and keep the good part of the business,” he replied. But what about when the businesses failed and Bain made money anyway? “They did make an investment and had to recoup the money they could,” he said. If Romney didn’t snare profits like that for himself, Lavallee said sympathetically, he “wouldn’t be in business. He’d be working in a factory like me.”
Again and again on the campaign trail in recent weeks, I spoke to voters whose positive attitudes toward Romney’s wealth and business background surprised me—people who had every reason to resent his success but in fact were inclined to celebrate it. In Council Bluffs, Iowa, I met Dan Strietback, 32, a manager at a Panera café, who told me that, while he knew Bain had laid off plenty of workers, he saw the economic model it was part of as “the best method for the United States of America.” “Everyone’s going to fail now and then,” he said. “It’s when you pick yourself up and carry on.” But what about the sheer scale of Romney’s wealth? “I look at Romney as someone who got some help from his family but worked his butt off for it,” he told me. “It makes me want to work hard, too, and maybe get some money for myself, too.”
Then there was Anne Field of Concord, New Hampshire, a Barack Obama voter who is planning on switching to Romney in November. Field, 64, told me that business has been pretty good at the small plumbing firm where both she and her husband work and that, in any case, she did not blame Obama for the slow recovery. But she is worried about her retirement savings and her daughter’s difficulty finding a job, and she thinks Romney’s business experience is well-suited to a moment when “we need to be tough” and “cut things.” When I asked what she made of the less appealing side of Bain’s work, she shrugged. “That’s what his business was,” she said. “More power to him.”
As the campaign has unfolded, I’ve kept returning to these conversations in my mind. For weeks now, Newt Gingrich has been hammering Romney for having presided over leveraged buyouts at Bain. And, while it remains to be seen whether Gingrich can sustain the momentum from his South Carolina upset, it’s already clear that Obama’s reelection strategy will pursue a similar tack, assuming Romney eventually wins the nomination. The president, it appears, will seek to portray Romney as a plutocrat who made tens of millions of dollars by slicing and dicing companies, regardless of the collateral damage—depicting him, in Mike Huckabee’s memorable 2008 description of his then-rival, as “the guy who fires you.” Obama political guru David Axelrod recently provided a preview of this strategy when he told CNN: “Saving an industry, as the president did, is different than strip-mining companies in order to—in order to profit off of them, which is, in many cases, what Mr. Romney did. … The question is: Is that the philosophy that you want in the White House?”