By GAIL COLLINS
Do you think it’s a coincidence that ever since the world’s physicists announced that they had discovered a possible breakthrough in the study of mass and energy last week, our politics has taken on a kind of black-hole quality?
First, Bain Capital. Let’s see if we can get this straight. In 1999, Mitt Romney quit his hypersuccessful financial career at the private-equity firm in order to run the troubled Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. “I would walk away from my leadership at Bain Capital at the height of its profitability and take a position without compensation,” he wrote in his book “Turnaround.”
He was out, gone — walked away. Get it? It is very important that you do because given the hysteria with which the Romney campaign is defending this 1999 termination marker, you would think that in the next few years Bain had embarked on a new and lucrative path involving the slave labor of My Little Ponies.
Romney gave five network television interviews on the subject on Friday. While it was true that a bunch of Securities and Exchange Commission filings submitted into the new millennium described Romney as Bain Capital’s boss, that was a technicality, he told CNN.
Well, actually, he said, “I was the owner of an entity that is filing that information.” Also that there’s a difference between an owner and “a person who’s running an entity.”
It was Romney’s Star Trek moment. They were always talking about entities on Star Trek, and entities were very seldom good news.
By the time Mitt had cleared the interview decks, he was sounding more earthbound and demanding that President Obama apologize for an aide who said that Romney had either lied or committed a felony. I believe I speak for all Americans when I say that it would be nice if presidential campaigns avoided the use of the word “felony” except perhaps when discussing the occasional member of Congress.
But let’s get back to that entity. In the period between 1999 and 2002, Bain Capital engaged in a certain amount of activity along the steel-mill-closing, toymaker-killing, job-exporting lines. But Romney says he wasn’t responsible because he had walked away. The figure skaters and curling teams needed him. He and Bain were finito.
Sort of. While he was in Utah getting the luge runs in shape, Romney was also still getting a six-figure salary for being a Bain “executive.” Perhaps for Mitt, that was just the going-away equivalent of a monogrammed briefcase. Although it does sort of take the steam out of his principled refusal to accept any money from the Olympics until his turnaround was successfully completed.
So to summarize: Romney was at Bain after 1999, but not necessarily in the sense of occupying physical space. He was employed by folks in Utah, but not in the sense of the people who made out his paycheck.
If we ever manage to really get our heads around Higgs boson, perhaps we will also be able to understand the Mitt Romney Olympics period.
The Democrats suggested all this could be cleared up if Romney would release his back tax returns. There are actually very few things in the universe that the Democrats do not think would be made better if Romney released his tax returns.
This has not been a great stretch for Mitt. Pictures from his family vacation made him look dorky and rich. A woman recently asked the House speaker, John Boehner, how he was going to “make me love Mitt Romney,” and Boehner basically told her that it was impossible.
This was at a fund-raiser in West Virginia. Boehner said that come November, his side would be going to the polls to get rid of Barack Obama, and that the only ones marching off to vote Republican because they actually liked the idea of making Mitt Romney president would be his co-religionists and folks who have been invited to his house for dinner. (“Mitt Romney has some friends, relatives and fellow Mormons ... some people that are going to vote for him. But that’s not what this election is about.”)
Barack Obama is anti-matter. That’s what this election is all about.
Returning to Washington, Boehner triumphantly led the House through its 33rd symbolic vote to eliminate the Obama health care program. According to an estimate by CBS News, the House has spent 80 hours on this effort. As a result, the Republican leadership probably won’t have time to deal with a bipartisan Senate bill to fix the financial problems at the U.S. Postal Service, which is overwhelmed with debt obligations, many of them because of unnecessary and intrusive Congressional regulations.
The Republicans currently have a symbolic legislative agenda and a presidential candidate who can be in two places at one time, but whom nobody likes.
Other than that, it’s all good. Nobody’s brought up the dog on the car roof for days.
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