On MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown” Tuesday morning, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) echoed President Obama’s comments from Monday by arguing that what takes place in private equity is different from best practices in the public sector. Warner said that Bain and private equity were “a valid topic of debate.”
“One of the things I found as I made the transition to public service, there is a different skill set,” said Warner, who founded the venture capital firm Columbia Capital in 1989. Warner said that in the private sector, you’re “looking for short-term profits” to help investors, which is different from the longer-term investments made by government.
Bain capital was a very successful business. I think they got a good return for their investors. That is what they were supposed to do. I think when you’re in public life, though, what you’ve got is a different time horizon. The notion that everything in government is exactly the same way that it is in business, they’re different time horizons when you’ve got to invest for the long haul, when you’ve actually do the kind of early stage investing, whether in preschool, whether its in K-12, whether infrastructure that don’t pay back quarter to quarter.
The RNC grabbed two sentences from Warner’s appearance (“Bain capital was a very successful business. I think they got a good return for their investors.”) and sent it out in an email Wednesday morning as evidence of more “Obama supporters criticizing Obama’s attacks on private equity.”
