who gains from the bain wars?

The Obama campaign's focus on Mitt Romney's time at Bain has been successful in one regard: they have kept the media's attention on that story for a few weeks. But there's no evidence, yet, that it's changed voters' minds. The polls continue to show a very close race, with Obama very slightly in the lead. Romney's ratings have shown no significant deterioration, nationally or (as far as I'm aware) in battleground states, where Obama's attack ads have been running day and night.

The Democrats may argue that such things take time to feed through to voters' perceptions. They may also believe that they are neutralising Romney's business background, turning a potentially winning issue for him into a draw.

There's another possibility, though, more worrying from their point of view: that the net effect of all this attention on Romney's track record is to inform voters who haven't been paying attention of one salient fact about the Republican candidate: he's a businessman. And hey, isn't a business guy just what we need right now?

That might explain why a new poll shows Romney with "a significant edge" over Obama when it comes to managing the economy. Given that economic competence is likely to be the most important factor in determining the identity of November's victor, that is quite alarming for the Democrats.

Comments

[Hal]

Mitt Romney was going to tell the low-information voters, over and over, that he was a businessman, whatever the Obama campaign did. But what kind of businessman? The kind who cares about his employees and the long term, or some other kind? Maybe the kind who siphons cash out of companies, hollows them out, and "rightsizes" their workforce? And who has secret foreign bank accounts, too. I think that the Obama people will do pretty well with these attacks. They're personal and lurid, but at least they are also consonant with Romney's policies, which is more than one can say of a lot of past personal attacks (see Kerry, John).

[Robbie]

I still think there is, somehow, a chance that Romney will get identified in the minds of low-info voters with the kind of plutocrat who got us into this financial mess.

Obviously I don't know, but it doesn't feel like a big and complicated connection to make, even if it does, in reality, fudge a few things.