Mitt Romney has bragged about his abilities as a business person. He has pushed his record in the private sector, as a corporate executive, in the course of touting how he would address problems in the economy in a way superior to President Obama’s.

   1) Realize Romney jokingly referred to himself has having been unemployed for over ten years. But that is not a joke in the sense that he has been out of the private sector, operating a business, for that period.

   2) Instead, he has run for office—unsuccessfully—for much of that time.

   3) When he was a corporate executive, his business was not to build enterprises, but to take over successful businesses the stock prices of which were undervalued; i.e., the people who ran those businesses had run them successfully but the stock price had not risen to reflect the success. Bain Capital would buy the low-priced stock, take over management, can people, borrow against assets, give its own executives bonuses, and leave a hulk in its wake.

   4) Romney runs for office this time through the use of attack ads. There’s nothing new with attack ads. But: 1) he does not have the guts to run the ads through his own campaign but through his shadow Super-Pac and spends twice the money on there as his own campaign runs on ads it runs and 2) offers nothing positive except his experience in the private sector—a topic he does not want to address if specifics about Bain Capital are raised.

   That leaves me with an impression of Mitt Romney as a nihilist.