[Christine Romans:] The haves versus the want-mores. It's at the heart of this presidential election. Good morning, everyone, I'm Christine Romans. Forget campaign cash, the new politics of money is about what you think about the wealthy. When it comes to jobs, President Obama wants you to focus on Governor Romney's time at Bain Capital, a private equity firm. But what is private equity? It's big investors like pension funds, university endowments, and wealthy people who pool their money together to invest in anything that can make them a profit. Often they zero in on failing companies to fix them or break them apart or sell them. And as this Obama campaign ad shows, that can mean layoffs.
[John Wiseman:] A paying job that you can support and raise a family on is hugely important.
[Unidentified Male:] That stopped with the sale of the plant to Bain Capital.
[Unidentified Female:] I thought that I was going to retire from there. I had about two-and-a-half years to go. I was suddenly 60 years old. I had no health care.
[Romans:] You're going to be seeing a lot of that. No surprise Governor Romney has a different take. He claims to have created 100,000 jobs, at least. These are the investments Bain made in Staples, Sport Authority, Domino's, there's a lot of others. These are their success stories. And Romney is counting jobs created even after Bain was out of the picture, because that's what private equity does, it comes in, cleans up a company, sells it, or moves it forward. It's hard to measure though how many jobs Bain and Romney created in their private equity investment, it's from 1984 to 1999. Bain tells us they don't record payroll numbers for deals and private equity is private. Once a company is no longer publicly listed, the books are closed. But today, with a painfully slow recovery, should we even be talking at all about Bain?
[Newt Gingrich , Former Presidential Candidate:] How can you be the president with the worst unemployment record since the Great Depression, the longest period of deep unemployment since the 1930s, and pick a fight over job creation?
[Romans:] Will Cain is a CNN contributor who has been jumping off of his seat for the past minute.
[Will Cain, Cnn Contributor:] I'm so excited to talk about this.
[Romans:] As a conservative are you happy to see this election focused on this record as opposed to the president's record on jobs?
[Cain:] Do I look happy? I am thrilled to have this conversation over Bain. I agree with the president 100 percent. This is not a distraction. This is what the election is about, because this is nothing short of an indictment of profits and capitalism. That is the truth, Christine.
[Romans:] All right. Roland Martin is a political analyst. Roland, we talked about the anger of the middle class, it's because of numbers like these we're about to show you, the Congressional Budget Office found income for the top 1 percent jumped 275 percent between 1979 and 2007. The middle class saw income grow by just 40 percent during that same time. When the president chooses to bring his jobs argument back to Bain, Republicans claim what he really wants you to hear is that these numbers show guys like Romney have rigged the game against the middle class.
[Roland Martin, Cnn Political Analyst:] And of course he wants to have that conversation, because what Will also does not want to admit is when you talk about a lot of these private equity companies, there's a difference between folks who actually want to buy a company, build it up, invest it, grow it, as opposed to go in, pile on lots of debt...
[Romans:] Now wait a minute, I want to go back Roland, hold on. Let's go back to the steel mill, though, the president's ad about the steel mill. Steel, I mean, it wasn't really that much of a bet that steel was going to go out of I mean, steel and paper are the two big companies that he gets nailed about. Those were failing enterprises, many of them. And steel and paper had a really bad 20 years. Not because of Bain, way before Bain.
[Martin:] But no, no, I understand that. But, look, I can look at any number of companies. What I'm saying is the average person out there, what they're looking at is when these guys come in, and how they do business has a direct impact on somebody who is just a regular worker, who's trying to feed their family, pay their mortgage, and send their kid to college. And so I get the Wall Street argument Will wants to make. But when you're one of those folks who they put out of a job, trust me, you're not sitting here going, I'll fatten your pockets but I'm the one who don't have a job.
[Cain:] All right. I get it. I get your argument, too, Roland, because it has been made about 100 times now that you'd like to argue that private equity and Bain Capital in particular has made money magically somehow by destroying companies. And you synthesize that by suggesting what they do...
[Martin:] That's not what I said.
[Cain:] ... is they go in hold on. They go in and they load companies up with debt, they fire employees, and suck it out of the profits. So you have to answer one simple question if that is your premise. If Bain Capital did that, if that was their modus operandi, why have they been in business since 1987? No debt lender in the world would continue to fund a guy like that.
[Martin:] First of all, we are looking at a variety of companies in terms of how they operate. And again...
[Cain:] We're talking about Bain.
[Martin:] ... it's what exactly no, no, but here's the deal, though. OK. We're talking about what he did in terms of various companies. And what the president is saying, which is a valid argument, is that when it has been a problem, it is open for criticism, it is open for interpretation, it is open for analysis. And so
[Romans:] OK.
[Martin:] It's a whole different job description.
[Romans:] Let me bring in "Joe the vice president" crossing "Joe the plumber," when the vice president, Joe Biden, weighed in on the Bain issue this week. Listen, guys.
[Joe Biden, Vice President:] Your job as president is to promote the common good. That doesn't mean the private equity guys are bad guys. They're not. But that no more qualifies you to be president than being a plumber.
[Romans:] All right. Will, private equity firms like Bain, they're not about creating profits. They're about creating or not about creating jobs, rather, they're about creating profits. That's what private enterprise does and then the theory I guess is that at the end of that there are jobs that are created.
[Cain:] It's more than a theory.
[Romans:] Why is Romney's time at Bain Capital relevant to this election?
[Martin:] Well, first of all, let me explain this also. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. OK. Jobs are not the intention of private equity. Profits are. And jobs are the by-product. Why does that qualify Mitt Romney to be president? Well, if you listen to President Barack Obama, and then we'll use Joe Biden to back him up, what does a president do? President Obama said he creates an equitable tax structure, he creates clusters for manufacturing bases. It's a laundry list of things that no human being is qualified to do when you lay it out like that. However a man that has played in the private market successfully to net job growth I think is pretty qualified to go in and get the economy on the right track.
[Romans:] I'm going to ask you each one question, and I want a succinct answer. Roland, what kind of capitalist do you think these two candidates are? How is their capitalism different?
[Martin:] I would say that Mitt Romney is a 100 percent red meat-eating capitalist, whereas President Obama, as the vice president said, looks at it from the common good, say what how can I be concerned with a person at the top, but also the person in the middle, and the bottom, because you want to bring them up.
[Cain:] I unfortunately am not as committed as Roland is to believing that Mitt Romney is a dedicated adherent to pure market capitalism. But I think he's better than President Obama, because the answer to your question is I think he is at the very least a social democrat in the European form, which is...
[Romans:] Really? The president.
[Cain:] Which just means you have a very tenuous relationship with capitalism.
[Romans:] Hmm. That's as close as you can get to actually saying... All right. All right. We're going to leave it there guys.
[Martin:] Those are called silly talking points.
[Cain:] No, no, no, that's called understanding the ideologies.
[Martin:] "Social democrat," "European model." What are you going to say next, he wears Armani all day?
[Cain:] That's you, Roland. We all know that's you in this family.
[Romans:] Oh man. All right, guys, have a great weekend.
[Martin:] No, actually, I wear Sean John, American company.
[Romans:] OK. You guys keep fighting it out during the break, because I've got something for the college kids that's really important here. Coming up in YOUR BOTTOM LINE, just what does that diploma get you? Some harsh advice to the class of 2012 and to America from a former labor secretary. And Governor Romney says American students are getting a third-world education, calling it the civil rights issue of our time. An issue largely absent from this campaign finally surfaces.