And Greg Sargent of the Washington Post Jumps the Shark as Well...
UPDATE: DeLong Smackdown Watch: Greg Sargent is unhappy with my framing of his column. He says focus on the big picture he paints:
After Romney severed his direct managerial control over the company, it broadened an approach originally set in motion by Romney — who retained the title of CEO and chairman for several more years — by investing in companies that broke new ground in helping companies ship jobs overseas. Anyone have a problem with the above description of what happened?… [T]hat description of what happened is itself likely to be enough to damage Romney’s overall case...
Touché...
ORIGINAL: Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
The usually-reliable Greg Sargent of the Washington Post:
Don’t go down the Bain rabbit hole: Under Mitt Romney, Bain Capital — which he co-founded and helped build into a money-making powerhouse — invested in companies that were pioneers in facilitating the practice of outsourcing. After Romney severed his direct managerial control over the company, it broadened an approach originally set in motion by Romney — who retained the title of CEO and chairman for several more years — by investing in companies that broke new ground in helping companies ship jobs overseas. Anyone have a problem with the above description of what happened?…
[T]hat description of what happened is itself likely to be enough to damage Romney’s overall case.
As far as I can tell, no one has established evidence that Romney had direct involvement with the controversial deals involving jobs getting shipped overseas. Is Romney partly responsible for the activities of a company at which he remained listed as CEO and chairman, even if he was not directly involved in running it? That’s ultimately a matter of opinion…
No. That is not a matter of opinion. If you build a company and run a company, then you bear partial responsibility for what the company does after you stop showing up at the office very day even if you do not remain sole shareholder, CEO, chairman, and president.
There are two roads you can go down: (i) the formal-legal--the person who holds the title and has the legal authority and responsibility is responsible until there is a formal and legal transfer of authority and responsibility to somebody else--or (ii) the practical--the person who chooses the personnel and establishes the company's standard operating procedures bears responsibility for what the people he hired did according to the standard operating procedures he established until enough time passes that his imprint on the company die away.
Both the formal-legal and the practical points of view lead to the same place--and it is not the place both Greg Sargent and Glenn Kessler pretend it does
