With the start of the Republican National Convention tomorrow, the political season officially arrives, and magazines are getting ready as Mitt and Bam gear up for the main event.
In a “Special Convention Issue,” Time looks into “the mind of Mitt,” analyzing the private-equity deals that made candidate Romney rich at Bain Capital. The magazine reports that Staples and Domino’s Pizza were big successes that grew to dominate their niches, creating thousands of jobs in the process. However, it also cites the case of papermaker Ampad, which ended up laying off workers, slashing wages and benefits, closing an Indiana factory and filing for bankruptcy in 2000 after eight years under Bain’s ownership. Despite all this, Bain reaped more than $100 million on the deal. Time likewise reports that Bain bought the highly profitable medical-tech firm Dade International in 1994, then saddled it with debt, fired workers and led it finally into bankruptcy in 2002. Despite the disaster, Bain made $242 million, plus $100 million in fees on an initial investment of $30 million, Time says..
Fortune, meanwhile, in its “Election Special” takes a bipartisan approach to the contest by having what it bills the odd-couple of reporting—centrist Geoff Colvin and man-of-the-people Allan Sloan — team on their coverage. They first offer their own blueprint for getting our economic house in order, including asking employees to pay taxes on their health insurance. This is not a bad curtain-raiser for separate profiles on President Obama’s and Romney’s plans if elected. The conclusion: Obama try to get bold new economic reforms passed quickly, while Romney, despite choosing Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, will likely be looking more for bipartisan compromise.
A more discouraging view will be found in Harper’s, whose readers might be left with the sinking feeling that the nation’s leadership lacks anyone with real substance. One plodding piece by Contributing Editor David Samuels seems to suggest as much about Obama, who is described as using “words that call attention to the desire of his audience to feel part of a collective in search of something better without referring in any tangible way to real-world problems faced by any specific class, gender, or race.” But there’s little substance there. Elsewhere, the monthly mag delivers a less-than-flattering depiction of Romney in s piece entitled “Fifty Shades of Gray,” which quotes prospective New England voters sharing such glib insights as Romney having “no soul.” Ouch!
You’ll find no ads in the left-leaning New Republic, but you will get some liberal red meat. Massachusetts Democrats’ candidate for the US Senate, Elizabeth Warren, gets major treatment in the current edition. The big story is on Romney operative Stuart Stevens, whose life of adventure is well chronicled. Stevens brings needed life to robo-Romney, and the New Republic almost backfires on its political mission by highlighting him. Still, the magazine is dull by design, trying too hard to look like The New Yorker.
Elsewhere, on specific issues concerning the electorate, The Nation tackles gun control, in the wake of a rash of mass shootings. But we soon found our eyes were glazing over from the same old statistics about out-of-control gun deaths. Why bother reading about gun control if there’s nothing new to say? Without movement or new insights on the issue, arguments against guns become a dried-up diatribe. Unfortunately, we felt the same about the accompanying piece on mental illness. (People go crazy and shoot people and no one cares.) We preferred the piece on a Romney presidency, in which the author predicts that the candidate will never go back to being the moderate he was when he was governor of Massachusetts because he will be under too much pressure from the party to toe the current party line. Now that’s something to think about.
And The New Yorker looks at one little-discussed aspect of the country’s costly War on Drugs: the sorry plight of the snitch. Threatened with harsh minimum-sentencing guidelines for even petty offenses, the accused — who often are as young as 14 or 15 — are coerced into becoming “confidential informants” in a harrowing role that typically involves “no paperwork and no institutional oversight.”
And if all this leads you to feel the need for some nonpolitical-scandal reading, there’s always Newsweek, which includes an over-the-top puff piece on Lance Armstrong that hails the alleged doper cyclist as “a hero, one of the few we have left in a country virtually bereft of them.”