Michael Barbaro and Ashley Parker write for the New York Times

Campaign advisers to former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, stung by unexpectedly fierce attacks from Republican rivals on his career as a corporate buyout specialist, are scrambling to avoid a prolonged and nasty battle over his business record before it does lasting damage to the front-runner.

Mitt’s problems is that he wants to run as a jobs-creating businessman, but his actual record at the helm of Bain Capital is secret, and apparently will remain so. So, Mittens is running on bullshit.

The campaign intends to cast Mr. Romney, a founder and a former chief executive of Bain Capital, as a defender of market capitalism, a bedrock principle of Republicanism, and to suggest that those who assail his business background are outside the party’s mainstream.

In his victory speech Tuesday night, Mr. Romney lamented that “desperate Republicans” were attacking the free enterprise system and the very notion of success.

“This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation,” he said. “The country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy.”

But he’s been going around claiming to have created a hundred thousand jobs, sometimes tens of thousands of jobs, sometimes hundreds of thousands of jobs, and he can’t prove it. (The number appears to vary with Romney’s mood; sort of like the number of known communists Joe McCarthy used to claim were in the State Department.) Keach Hagey writes for Politico that Romney’s time at Bain Capital is in a “black box.” Attempts by journalists to get any kind of data whatsoever from Bain have been solidly unsuccessful. Bain won’t even tell journalists where its money is invested.

“Bain, even for a private equity firm, is particularly private,” said Josh Kosman, author of “The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy.” “Most private equity firms are because once you look behind the numbers, there is much they don’t want you to see.”

And the fact is, the number of net jobs Mitt’s work at Bain might have created, or uncreated, might be a figure that even Bain can’t pin down. They keep track of how much money they are making for investors, not whether they are creating jobs.

Some reporters have managed to get information by other means –

Reporters have produced a steady stream of human stories and case studies … such as The New York Times’s report on how Bain squeezed big payouts from medical company Dade Behring even as it headed for layoffs and bankruptcy, or Reuters’s tale of how Bain managed to make money from its purchase of a Kansas steel mill that ultimately had to have its pension fund bailed out by the government.

So, at least some news outlets are trying. And this is a hopeful sign. In 2000, George W. Bush got away with calling himself a successful businessman when he had been anything but. But the GOP was solidly with Dubya, keeping his back and fluffing up his record. Mittens doesn’t have that advantage. And I think it’s also the case that in the past dozen years the rise of political bloggers has made professional media a little more alert.

There is some talk that airing Mittens’s dirty laundry now may help him later, but frankly I don’t see how. If the image of Romney as a vampire squid solidifies in the public mind it would take inordinate charm to overcome that, and Mittens doesn’t have inordinate charm.

Ooo, somebody must’ve taken Newt to the woodshed. He’s telling people he made a mistake criticizing Mittens’s record at Bain Capital. What were the puppet masters going to do? Close Callista’s Tiffany’s account? Oh, the humanity …

Fortunately, the SuperPAC preparing to saturate South Carolina with Romney vampire squid ads says it is not backing down. And you can watch the entire “When Mitt Romney Came to Town” documentary online.

Might as well have some fun with this, even if we are on the Titanic and guessing whether it’s going down bow first or stern first — David Weigel has a must-read post up comparing the Romney road to the nomination with the path John McCain took four years ago. It’s called “Haven’t We Lived Through This Primary Before?” and it begins,

I’m thinking of a Republican primary. It starts with a candidate (John McCain/Mitt Romney) who ran once before, came in second place, and won over the party’s elite class without winning over its base. Other candidates, understandably unwilling to accept this, line up: An under-funded social conservative (Mike Huckabee/Rick Santorum), an elder statesman who’s walked to the altar three times (Rudy Giuliani/Newt Gingrich), a libertarian who wants to bring back the gold standard (Ron Paul/Ron Paul).

The BooMan takes the comparison further. Who will be this year’s Sarah Palin? Marco Rubio? Chris Christie?

In Weird News — Haley Barbour is retiring as governor of Mississippi. On his last day in office, he granted full and unconditional pardons to 193 criminals. In addition, last week he pardoned five convicted murderers who had been doing custodial work at the governor’s mansion. Some of the other pardoned convicts also had been found guilty of murder, although none were on death row.

However, he failed to pardon the Scott sisters. Go figure. At least they were both given early releases last year.

Anyway — just seems odd.

Mittens has a formidable lead in South Carolina polls, and it’s going to be fun to see how it holds up in the coming week.

Steve Kornacki says that Newt and Perry — mostly Newt, though — will be bashing Perry Romney with Bain Capital. Thanks to his recent but short-lived surge, Newt has money.

Gingrich will head to South Carolina intent on exploiting every one of Romney’s vulnerabilities in the state, and he’ll be aided by at least $5 million from a casino magnate, Sheldon Adelson, who is bankrolling a Super PAC that aims to do to Romney what Romney did to Gingrich in Iowa.

The South Carolina campaign is just beginning, Kornacki says.

Romney enters South Carolina as the favorite. A poll last week, just after Iowa, put him at 37 percent, his best showing of the entire campaign and nearly 20 points ahead of the next candidate. The numbers showed that Romney is very capable of winning the state, especially if the rest of the field remains split (Santorum finished second in the poll with 19 percent, while Gingrich was at 18 — meaning that together they accounted for the same share of the vote as Romney). But the numbers also came with a giant asterisk: Millions and millions of dollars in vicious attack ads aimed at reminding South Carolinians of all of the many reasons they have to be suspicious of Romney had not yet run.

Those ads will hit the airwaves tomorrow and won’t stop until the 21st. Romney may still emerge with a victory, and thus the nomination. But it’s not going to be pretty.

On the other hand — Jonathan Martin and John Harris write at Politico that the GOP establishment is rallying around Romney now.

These influential voices — who include many fund-raisers and other sorts of people who are unwise for politicians to alienate — will greet the kind of scorched-earth tactics necessary to slow Romney’s march with hostility.

— Many conservative activists, while not especially enthusiastic about Romney or his establishment backers, are appalled by the odd turn of campaign rhetoric in the closing days of New Hampshire, with Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman taking aim at Romney’s record running the private equity firm Bain Capital. These people, who include radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, are apoplectic that anti-Romney Republicans are making common cause with anti-business Democrats.

Of course, in Reality World, opposition to Mittens’s style of cancerous vampire squid exploitation capitalism is not “pro business” at all, since it actually destroys business. But in the minds of the GOP establishment, capitalism really is the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money. And protecting that ability means more to them than duty, honor, country, or anything else. They’d sell their grandmas first.

And you know every cog in the noise machine, from Rush Limbaugh to Faux News, will be ordering the people of South Carolina to vote for Mitt, or else. Because from now on he will be branded the only true Republican in the race. Just watch. As for Newt, the genuinely demented James Taranto is calling him “Barack Hussein Gingrich.”

Taranto also says that Gingrich’s attacks against Romney now will inoculate Romney against similar attacks in the general election. I don’t see why that would be true, however. Romney really is a disgusting piece of work. Unlike George W. Bush, who was able to keep the shoddy details of his “oil man” career mostly hidden from the public in 2000, Romney’s dirty laundry will be in plain view from now until November, assuming he’s the nominee. If anything, it might actually help Obama that Republicans are dishing this stuff now. It makes the attacks seem nonpartisan and more credible to the public.

Update: See also Joan Walsh, “GOP Rallies Around Vulture Capitalism, Not Romney.”

It’s an interesting moment. Multiple news organizations reported that even close allies are telling Gingrich to cut out the attacks on Romney, but he’s already purchased an estimated $1.5 million in South Carolina airtime for his “House of Bain” spots, plus a nasty ad claiming Romney had “governed pro-abortion” in Massachusetts. What’s Gingrich going to do? He hates Romney, but he loves predatory capitalism as much as Limbaugh does. He doesn’t believe his own Bain Capital attacks. Can he continue to hurt Romney without damaging his own chances to return to the right-wing gravy train when he goes down to defeat? Trust me, the monied interests are not interested in hiring anti-capitalist “historians” to not-lobby for them. Gingrich is torn between vengeance and greed. Sucks to be him. Fun to watch.

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Nate Silver’s projection for tonight:

Lest we forget — Rand Paul explains his family’s antipathy to civil rights.

Newt actually said this:

“You have to ask the question, is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money?”

He was done already, but now the Right will see to it that Newt never appears on Faux News again.

The former Speaker is making the case that, in contrast to good old fashioned businesses who make stuff, Romney and his ilk have instead gamed the system to create a soulless machine that profits from the misery of others. [...]

“I am totally for capitalism, I am for free markets,” Gingrich assured reporters on Monday. “Nobody objects to Bill Gates being extraordinarily rich, they provide a service.” What he instead is concerned about is when an investor receives “six-to-one returns, and the company goes bankrupt.”

One of the drones at The Corner equates an attack on Romney as an attack on capitalism itself. So, yeah, apparently, the answer to Newt’s question — is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money? — is yes. And if you don’t like it, you must be a commie.

Over the years I’ve heard a lot of historians suggest that FDR probably saved capitalism in America, since his New Deal reforms created a kind of sustainable and workable version of capitalism that benefited the broadest number of Americans. But now the Right has kicked that to pieces (with help from some elements of the Left), and the old slash-and-burn, malefactors-of-great-wealth version of capitalism is back in the saddle.

And this version of capitalism is not sustainable, and it’s not workable. It’s like a cancer that gets stronger by destroying healthy tissue. It ends in death of the organism it consumed.

But on the Right you aren’t allowed to say that, or even think it, because “free market capitalism” really has been linked to God, on a not entirely subconscious level, and government regulation really has been linked to Stalinism and thereby Satan. This is not an exaggeration; this is how righties think. And I agree with Steve M that the Right will rally around Mitt and defend him from Newt’s attacks.

Mitt is going on offense, saying that free enterprise itself is on trial.

Mittens will be the GOP nominee. Count on it. The question is, of course, how the electorate at large will absorb and process this argument.

Elsewhere: Mitt made a comment about liking to fire people in New Hampshire that created some stir. See Sarah Kliff and James Fallows for more analysis of that.

Someone made an anti-Romney documentary about Mittens and Bain capital, and now a Super PAC for Newt has bought it and is planning to run it in pieces as attack ads. Here is the trailer, which is an attack ad in itself:

The “production values” of this thing make it almost a stereotype of right-wing attack ads, complete with ominous imagery and music. But Steve M. argues that this approach is unlikely to hurt Mittens among right-wingers. Why? Because to accept that Mittens exploited capitalism to make a quick buck at others’ expense is to admit that capitalism is not perfect. It is exploitable. It needs to be regulated.

Oops.

Thomas Frank makes the point that Romney is actually the quintessential bagger candidate. So what if he’s not credible on social values issues, like abortion.

If nothing else, you in the Tea Party movement have spent the last three years teaching Americans that they no longer matter — not when we’re supposedly in a battle for the very soul of capitalism.

And here comes Mitt Romney, the soul of American capitalism in the flesh.

Frank argues that if Mittens is the nominee — which is looking pretty likely at the moment — the Right will be forced to come clean that it’s all about defending the rich and privileged, and all the rhetoric about liberty and patriotism is window dressing.

And keep in mind that, with Mitt Romney, venture capitalist, carrying your banner in 2012, you will finally get to submit your capsized vision of social class to the verdict of the people — the actual flesh-and-blood people, that is, not the corporate “people” who make up the S&P 500. You will get to defend exactly the sort of “person” your movement has longed to defend since it was birthed by a CNBC reporter almost three years ago to the cheers of a bunch of derivatives traders in Chicago.

You will get to explain your peculiar conviction that the way to react to a gigantic slump brought on by frenzied finance is to unshackle Wall Street. You will get to line up behind a heroic businessman, like those rugged, resourceful fellows in the Ayn Rand novels you love. You will get to go into battle for the job creators, which is what all capitalists are, right? (Well, okay, maybe not the guys at Bain Capital, the particular outfit where Romney made his pile, but the theory is all that really matters, isn’t it?)

Indeed, your leadership cadre is already playing up the inevitable criticisms of Romney as a job decimator as a way of launching a grand debate about capitalism — by which they mean, of course, freedom itself. When Newt Gingrich criticized Romney a few weeks ago for his career in private equity, the airwaves of your winger-tainment world exploded with outrage. “This is the kind of risk-taking, free-market capitalism that most people who call themselves conservatives applaud,” intoned Brit Hume on Fox News. If Newt had a problem with Bain’s operations, announced syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg, “then Gingrich really doesn’t believe in capitalism at all.”

I’m actually starting to warm to the idea of Romney as the nominee. See also Krugman, “America’s Unlevel Field.”

Romney’s Inexplicable Debate Fibs

Mitt Romney’s generally strong debate performance was marred by two small and inexplicable shadings of fact — moments that left reporters, rivals, and allies shaking their heads and wondering why he he couldn’t just give a straight and obvious answer to relatively trivial questions.

The first lie was that he had dropped out of politics and gone back into business in 2006, when he left the governor’s office, when in fact he ran for President. In another obvious fib, he at first claimed he hadn’t seen a particular campaign ad, and then seconds later he described the ad.

So I did some googling, and there are all kinds of articles on the Web describing pathological liar as someone who lies habitually, or reflexively, because he just prefers to. Here’s one:

A compulsive liar is defined as someone who lies out of habit. Lying is their normal and reflexive way of responding to questions. Compulsive liars bend the truth about everything, large and small. For a compulsive liar, telling the truth is very awkward and uncomfortable while lying feels right. Compulsive lying is usually thought to develop in early childhood, due to being placed in an environment where lying was necessary. For the most part, compulsive liars are not overly manipulative and cunning (unlike sociopaths), rather they simply lie out of habit – an automatic response which is hard to break and one that takes its toll on a relationship (see, how to cope with a compulsive liar).

There are several kinds of pathological liars, and IMO Romney sounds more like a habitual liar than anything else:

Habitual pathological lying is, as the name suggest, habitual. Habitual liar lies so frequently, that it becomes a habit, as a result, he/she puts very little effort in giving a thought about what the output is going to be, nor does he/she care much to process whether it’s a lie or not, it’s simply a reflex & very often can be completely unnecessary or even opposite to his/her own needs. If he/she stops & thinks about it, he/she knows clearly it’s a lie.

Now he’s going around telling audience he knows what it feels like to be afraid of losing a job. Huh?

There’s something seriously wrong with this guy.

Charles Pierce on yesterday’s Republican candidate debate:

In brief, Saturday night may have been the most naked piece of point-shaving and game-throwing since the 1919 World Series. I’ve seen fixed prizefights where the issue was more in doubt. The other candidates went so far into the tank for Willard that they may not dry off until next August. In the 1950′s, Frankie Carbo would have had them all killed because they made it look so damned obvious. Where was the promised Gingrich assault on the frontrunner? Where was the blood, the guts, the glory? Where was the damn slasher film we all anticipated? This was a waltz, and a clumsy one. If the people in that audience had any pride at all, they’d have attacked the ABC platform and demanded satisfaction for this massive piece of consumer fraud.

However, news stories say that today the remaining Seven Clowns — they’re down to Five Clowns now, since Perry chose not to drop out just yet — went after Mittens today, so maybe they aren’t folding just yet.

Nate Silver says that Mr. Frothy’s surge may already have stalled.

Romney has a lead in New Hampshire worthy of Secretariat; it’s going to be a landslide. He is comfortably ahead in the polls in South Carolina, which will hold its primary on January 21. If he clobbers the rest of the field in those two contests, which is possible, it’s going to be very hard to stop him from being the nominee. Not that I mind.

Steve Benen is keeping track of Mitt’s mendacity. It’s a big job not enough people are doing. Mittens’s famous flip-flopping is almost a virtue in comparison.

And then there are the folks laid off by Mitt’s Bain Capital company.

Here’s the long version:

See also Paul Krugman, “Bain, Barack and Jobs.”

And don’t forget — Mitt wants to cut taxes on the wealthy even more.

Great Iowa Caucus postmortem — Necropolis Now.