RUSH: Bob Schieffer at CBS, it’s not going well out there for the Drive-Bys, the State-Controlled Media. They just don’t quite understand. For example, yesterday on Slay the Nation — or Sunday. Feels like Monday. All day yesterday I thought today was gonna be Wednesday. I mean, I spent a lot of time — not a lot of time, but a couple of instances yesterday, “Okay, what do I gotta do tomorrow, tomorrow’s gonna be Wednesday.” I was looking at my calendar for Wednesday stuff I’ve got to do, “Oh, no, that’s Tuesday, I’m free, I’m home clear.” I scheduled nothing, other than the standard, ordinary show prep stuff.
Anyway, Bob Schieffer, Slay the Nation, had Ed Gillespie on, and they were talking about Cory Booker and Obama’s hostility to business and so forth, and Schieffer tried to blame Romney for all this. He said to Gillespie, “Isn’t it a fair thing that Governor Romney’s the one that started this, the attacks on Bain?” Romney started this. I mean, he’s the one who came in and started talking about all these jobs he had created when in fact — I mean, venture capitalists don’t sit at the table and say, “Let’s think about some plan to see how we can create a bunch of jobs.” They sit down and say, “Let’s figure out how we can make some money here.”
So Ed Gillespie said, “Well, Bob, there’s a correlation between making money and growing a company and then job creation. It kind of all is tied together,” but what he was trying to say, Bob, old buddy, old pal was that you grow the business first. The purpose, the motivation, the inspiration is to have a business that’s in trouble, you save it, you bail it out, or a start-up, either way, you want to grow it. And you grow it, and you need people when you grow it. It’s a fine line here. These libs are trying to find any dirt on Romney. They’re trying to find any insensitivity. So here we are in a period of time where there is no job growth, there is no job creation. In fact, a lot of people — gonna have more details on this — a lot of people are gonna be losing unemployment benefits in the next couple of weeks, couple of months, and that’s gonna result in the unemployment rate coming down.
People are gonna go off the unemployment rolls which is gonna cause the unemployment rate to fall. No jobs will be created. The media is even reporting this, gleefully. They’re looking forward to being able to reduce the unemployment rate. Anyway, they’re trying to show here that Romney has no sensitivity, that private equity doesn’t have any sensitivity. They don’t care about creating jobs. Obama does. Obama cares about creating jobs, and Romney said all he cares about is profit. No, no, no. It’s a trick, and they’re using the old feelings versus fact. And I love Gillespie’s answer. “Look, Bob, you know, there’s a correlation between making money and growing a company and job creation. They all go hand in hand, Bob.” We’re just talking about why people invest their money.
Nobody sits around and says, “You know what, we need job growth. I think I’m gonna start a company so we can create jobs.” And we don’t start a company to create health care benefits for the community. It’s not why it happens. But nobody on the left, in the media or anywhere else, seems to have any understanding, especially news people, they think news divisions ought to be untied from any profit and loss sheet. I mean from Dan Blather to Klondike, all these people, they all believe that news divisions were serving such an important constitutional role that they could not be bound by the standard profit or loss sheet, that they should be permitted to lose money, their calling was so high.
They don’t have the slightest idea about real-world economics and how this all works. All they know is feelings and emotion, and when they get on to something that they think they can portray a conservative is heartless, then they head right down that path, and that’s what they think they’re getting done here. The fact of the matter is that the Bain attack by Obama is backfiring big time, and even Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times says so in an audio sound bite. But that wasn’t the only Schieffer instance. Here’s another one. Slay the Nation, Bob Schieffer talking to Bob Gibbs, Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary, now senior campaign adviser. Schieffer said, “The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday the campaign would actually become more aggressive with these attacks [on Romney and Bain]. They seem to be buying more time to run these ads. Have you done some polling? Why so aggressive so soon?”
GIBBS: Let’s be clear. This is the central and only point that Mitt Romney brings up, that in the words of his campaign would make him an economic savior for this country. What Bain Capital never did was focus on job creation. That’s not what Bain Capital does. It loads up companies with debt. It takes money out of those companies and pays those investors. It’s not about job creation. And that’s what Mitt Romney is running on.
RUSH: These guys, I tell you, folks, it’s an insult to your intelligence and to mine. It’ll play with certain people. I mean the shallow surface types who hear job creation and think that’s all that’s on the agenda here and not realizing it’s part of an all-encompassing process and equation. Loads up companies with debt, takes money out of those companies, pays those investors, not about job creation, that’s what Mitt Romney is running on. So Schieffer is beside himself. Bob is exasperated here ’cause what happened to hope and change? What happened to all of this unity? Here, listen to Schieffer in the next bite.
SCHIEFFER: You know, one of the refreshing changes when the president was elected, he talked about hope and change. Whatever happened to hope and change? Now it seems he’s just coming right out of the box with these old-fashioned negative ads, all campaigns seem to think are the basis of all campaigns now.
GIBBS: Bob, look, there’s gonna be a choice in this election. That’s what this campaign is gonna be about. Are you gonna be better — who are you gonna be better off with in the next four years.
RUSH: This is why I don’t watch these shows anymore. It’s why I watch very little cable news. It’s so formulaic and it’s utterly predictable. You know the kind of questions you’re gonna get from the host based on who the guest is and you know the formulaic answers you’re gonna get. You don’t have to watch Face the Nation to know that the Democrats are gonna go after Bain Capital and Romney because they go into debt, reward investors, not create jobs. You know that’s gonna happen. Frankly, it’s a waste of time for anybody who knows what’s going on, who has the slightest understanding, it’s a waste of time to watch these shows anymore, I think.
“What happened to hope and change?” Bob, you’re not paying attention. Obama ran, as a percentage, more negative ads in the 2008 campaign than in the history of presidential campaigns. Barack Obama did. And if you add the ads against Hillary in the primary, why, it’s not even close. Obama is the key. Have you ever heard of Saul Alinsky, Bob? So Bob, he’s wringing his hands, “Well, whatever happened to all this positive stuff? Whatever happened to hope and change?” Hope and change is a joke. It’s a nickname for Obama now.
Here, grab audio sound bite number two. E.J. Dionne Jr. Where was this? On Meet the Press. And it’s the same answer. And it’s the same thing. Only this time using me. They’re talking about Obama’s attack on Romney at Bain Capital. And again (sigh), the ad in question attacks Bain for doing things at a time Romney wasn’t even at Bain. That’s number one. Number two, the guy running Bain now is one of Obama’s biggest campaign bundlers.
Here’s E.J. Dionne Jr.’s take…
DIONNE: The argument over Bain is actually part of a substantive argument over the future of American capitalism. Uh, first, if… Romney from the beginning was saying his role as a job-creator at Bain was a key reason why he should be president. Well, thanks to this exchange even Rush Limbaugh has now said, “No,” uh, “private equity companies are not about creating jobs.” So I think they’ve already made that point.
RUSH: So, yeah, I said that, but this is taking me out of context in order to plug me in to their little hole or their little maze. Anybody who listens to this program or listens to me knows exactly what I said about this, what I mean by it. And this is the problem I get into. You know, I live in Realville, and in Realville things are really simple. They’re so simple, they’re hard to understand. And most people… Realville is a very small town, folks. There are very few people that live there.
We have fewer people in Realville than live in Rio Linda.
Realville sometimes slaps you upside the face. Realville does not have much in common with platitudes and “hope and change.” Realville has to do with “what is.” What is private equity? Where has private equity been? What does it do? I’ll tell you one thing: You listen to every Democrat who’s come out in opposition to Obama over doing this, and they know exactly what private equity is. Private equity builds. Private equity saves. Private equity grows when it works.
There’s no sure shot.
Everything’s a risk.
These are risk-takers; they try to take the best calculated risk they can.
If it works, jobs are saved first. Yeah, some people are laid off as the company is downsized, but as opposed to everybody being laid off and the company going down the tubes. Private equity comes in and saves it. They lop off what’s not working, they reorganize it — and then they, in turn, try to grow it. And if they do, jobs are created. And in the process, there are profits. In the process, the company grows. And everybody wins. And that’s not hard to understand.
When it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. When it works, it works. In Romney’s case, 80% of Bain’s investments worked. They had an 80/20 success rate, pure and simple. The regime is focusing on one thing: Romney said that he created 100,000 jobs. I know why Romney said it. He said it because it’s the meme; it’s the theme. We’ve got Obama who’s destroying jobs! The idea here that Mitt Romney is anywhere near Obama’s league in job destruction is laughable.
We’ve got a genuine job killer working in the Oval Office. “Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm! Mmm! Mmm!” has presided over some of the worst job news, situation, mess in the history of the country, since the Great Depression. And in that, Romney is saying, “I know how to create jobs. The things I did, a hundred thousand jobs were created.” Then the attack on Bain comes, and this leads people to try to explain to other people what the purpose of private equity is.
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