January 13, 2012 07:14 PM UTC

Stop! You're "Trashing Capitalism!"

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• by: Colorado Pols

Our friends at the Washington Post report:

Both former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry have argued that Romney destroyed jobs and lives at the venture firm Bain Capital by buying up and then shuttering struggling companies. A super PAC supporting Gingrich is airing ads in South Carolina attacking Romney’s record, using footage drawn from a 30-minute documentary called “King of Bain.”

The ad uses the same argument Romney has used on the campaign trail – that Bain helped Staples, the Sports Authority and Steel Dynamics create jobs.

“We expected the Obama administration to put free markets on trial, but as the Wall Street Journal said, ‘Mr. Romney’s GOP opponents are embarrassing themselves by taking the Obama line,'” the narrator concludes.

Allison Sherry at the Denver paper reports that GOP Rep. Cory Gardner joined yesterday in the pushback against attacks on Mitt Romney’s “corporate raider” record at Bain Capital, imploring Republicans running against Romney to refrain from such nasty Democrat-style “class warfare” (although Romney himself has done just as much to push that narrative). Newt Gingrich, for his part, has answered that he’s not disparaging capitalism so much, but heartless predatory outfits like Bain Capital that give capitalism a bad name.

No, says Gardner, that’s disparaging capitalism.

It’s an interesting pickle the Republican presidential challengers have gotten themselves into, having found a line of attack against the frontrunner that resonates, but with the side effect of upsetting key philosophical “free-market” assumptions among conservatives. They can’t take it back. Add that to the fact that these are probably futile attacks on the likely Republican nominee, and segue perfectly into President Barack Obama’s message, and you can easily see why player Republicans like Gardner suddenly realized that this had all gone much too far.

But so nobody accuses us of being unfair, Romney’s response ad follows too.