We'll do for your state what we, um,

already did to your state.



After Mitt Romney’s 2012 train wreck, you might think the private equity industry would want to stay far, far away from electoral politics. But at the outset of the 2014 cycle, something like the opposite has happened. In a handful of top Senate and gubernatorial races, private equity executives have already lined up to run and vowed not to repeat the mistakes of the Romney debacle.

In Romney’s home state of Massachusetts, former private equity executive Gabriel Gomez nabbed the Republican nomination for Secretary of State John Kerry’s old Senate seat. Halfway across the country in Illinois, former GTCR chairman Bruce Rauner is the frontrunner for governor on the Republican side. In Minnesota, a leading GOP gubernatorial candidate is Scott Honour, a former senior executive at the Gores Group private equity fund – while Twin Cities financier Mike McFadden, not a PE guy but a veteran of Lazard’s mergers-and-acquisitions branch, is also gearing up to run for Senate.

Well, this will go well. Really, if there's one thing all of America can agree on it's that we should take the industries most directly responsible for the dessication of the American industrial landscape, the gutting of previously healthy American institutions, and the half-assed faceplanting of the entire global economy and ask those chaps their advice on running the country Why stop with just the private equity firms? I'm sure someone, somewhere has come up with a national parks-based derivatives scheme by now. Oh—maybe we'll sell off the Grand Canyon in exchange for future stakes in a million much smaller holes throughout the country? Or maybe we'll sell it off in exchange for the existential idea of a hole—oh, that's much better. Then we don't have to worry about where we'll put the new hole, but we can still use the paperwork to fund a series of hole-backed hedge bets.All right, I think I see the problem here. The problem is that all these people still have too much damn money. They screwed up the country, but we bailed them out with a pile of free money, and now they're all running for office using all that extra cash we gave them instead of deciding which gutter bugs look the most edible. We really, really didn't think this through.

Anyway, it seems the lesson learned from the "Romney debacle" is that industry insiders looking to become the new crop of GOP candidates need to be more aggressive in blowing sunshine and roses up voter's investment-holes:



Geoffrey Rehnert, who helped found Bain Capital and criticized Romney’s response to Democratic attacks in 2012, said the first step to improving on Romney’s performance is telling a more accurate and appealing story about exactly what private equity companies do.

I think at this point most people know what private equity companies do—really, we're not dumb. The question is whether the behavior is helpful or just parasitical. In Bain's case, the emphasis seemed to be on the parasite side of things, and in fact the vast growth of the financial industry since the deregulation boom of the last decades has seemingly done little to nothing for the non-financial-sector portions of the nation. On the contrary; from wage stagnation to labor offshoring to a seemingly infinite number of new tax-dodging schemes, the growth of the sector seems cleanly correlated to a wider industrial and class-based deterioration. (This is especially evident in the way short-term profits are vacuumed out of otherwise-healthy companies so that they may instead be placed into a full gamut of newly invented casinos.)

Feel free to argue the point, by all means, but I'm not certain the American disillusionment with the financial class was merely a problem of awkward Romney salesmanship. We'll see. In the end it will come down to the records of each candidate, as it should, but it doesn't seem like the equity wags who have made their money by treating people fairly are the ones currently most keen on running for office under the Republican party banner. Because, well, duh.

