Gingrich is taking an awfully big risk with this Bain attack on Romney

“There is a huge difference between free-market capitalism that goes out and creates companies, grows jobs, and takes an appropriate profit, which can be quite large — I mean, Bill Gates has done fine,” Gingrich said. “It even makes sense to have companies that go out and re-organize inefficient companies and end up making very substantial profits out of doing it…What you have to question is if somebody went out and looted a company, leaving behind a shell.” If the Reuters report is accurate, Gingrich said, “Bain Capital actually makes a huge amount of money while cratering the company — I think you have to question whether that’s a very defensible form of capitalism.”

“I don’t want to pre-judge Romney,” Gingrich said. But “you can’t have capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down. You can’t have somebody who says, I’m so smart, I want a huge upside, and by the way I’m so smart you’re going to get ripped off while I get a huge upside.”

“If these things all turn out to be relatively valid,” Gingrich continued, referring to the case made against Romney in the new video, “at some point in the near future, he’s going to have to do a press conference just on Bain…I think he has to come in at some point and say these were companies we were involved in, this is the actual cash flow of these companies, and this is how it happened. Which is inevitably going to lead to questions about records that he apparently doesn’t want to release and conversations he’s not going to be able to avoid.”