MSNBC Figures Out How Romney Should Sell Bain -- He Needs Bill Clinton

January 14th, 2012 4:30 PM

On the Friday edition of Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC, Mitchell was trying to "help" Mitt Romney with all those anti-Bain Capital attacks. "It seems to me that Mitt Romney has to figure out a way to get around the vulture capitalist, you know, we are using that phrase as it comes from Rick Perry and others on the Republican side, using that phrase in quotation marks, he has to find a better narrative for that, has he so far?"

Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair -- the former New York Times reporter married to former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers -- naturally said Romney could sell this much better if he had all the charisma of liberal hero Bill Clinton: "The hard part for Mitt Romney is by the nature of his personality, the nature of his mannerisms, the nature of the way he is as communicator.He is not the ideal person to talk about that because he sounds so formal and so above it all. What he needs is somebody like Bill Clinton to explain the good side of what a company like Bain Capital did."

Mitchell added that Romney shouldn't try to claim that Bain created jobs -- like by helping get retailers like Staples off the ground:

ANDREA MITCHELL: You know one of the problems Todd, if you read Robert Zamos and some of the other writers that have been looking at venture capitalism, their job is not to create jobs.

PURDUM: No, their job is to maximize profit for their investors.

MITCHELL: And Mitt Romney mistake, perhaps, when you look at the authenticity question, was to claim that because of his experience at Bain Capital, he is a job creator. That is not really what Bain Capital is all about.

Purdum cast aspersions on the Romney start as a potential rerun of McCain 2008:

They are effectively making the President's general election case, Mitt Romney's opponents are right now. And four years ago, Andrea, John McCain won the nomination. The party as his mother said had to hold its nose and take him but in something like 19 competitive primaries and caucuses never got above the low 30s in Republican support. And if Governor Romney faces a similar thing, he may well face the similar fate in the fall.