The whole point of the Bain capital attack isn't to really "Harm" Romney, it is simply meant as a distraction to eat up time ...

Romney's best chance to beat Obama is to whittle away independent support for Obama and hope for a string of bad economic reports, or a economic meltdown in Europe, will push him over the top. In spite of how the race is portrayed, the swing from Obama to Romney doesn't have to be that large for Romney to win. Every day Romney has to defend against an attack that has been fact-checked several times over several years and repeatedly been called false and misleading is a day that he is not winning over independent voters; and this means that the economic reports have to be worse to move enough voters for Romney to win.

But then they could use that argument for Obama.  Of course, with him it would be true. 

And this will be part of the focus.  However, what is going to happen, if more and more Americans can't find work, and there is a push for less and less government involvement, is your line of reasoning is going to end up causing people to question free markets and capitalism itself.  If you say, "Well the free market did the best it could", and then suddenly a lot of people are losing ground, they will revolt against it.

And there is no guarantee that a market will most effectively allocate resources either or capital.  Individuals driven strictly by optimizing their own benefits, and maximizing profits for themselves, can end up not seeing long-term, and end up having things not as optimal as they can be.  A lack of any semblance of coordinating makes one worse off than coordinating.  Nash's Equilibrium goes to this, in that, individuals not factoring what other sellers in a market will do, based upon them strictly thinking in terms of maximizing their own profits, will result in a sub-optimal allocation of resources in an economy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

Beyond this, there is no guarantee either that we aren't facing a systemic issue of perpetual high unemployment.  Companies who decide to lay off for profits end up undercutting demand in the economy and causing economy to slow down.  Wall Street now reacts negative whenever unemployment numbers come out not good.   This is because demand has gotten to be sluggish.  Businesses are also sitting on large amounts of cash and not hiring as they possibly could.  This is because they don't see where there future demand is in place.  And the laid off labor, in the United States is facing jobs that are paying less than they used to.  Say maybe 20-30% are doing better, but the rest are doing worse.

Markets can theoretically end up working optimally, but lots can throw them off, including systemic corruption and fraud, as is being witnessed now.

Thing now is, where will labor get allocated to?  No one knows at this point.  And as far as Romney's company helping the economy.  Well, he did help himself.  In regards to him doing job creation, which is what he would use Bain for, Bain didn't even keep records on this, so no one can figure out for sure how many jobs Romney helped to create.  Job creation wasn't important to Bain.

Obama didn't stick a dog on the roof, Romney did.  So, the kill puppies argument doesn't work as well.  There is a better chance of replacing dogs and cats with jobs (or the unborn) with Obama, and maybe it sticks better, depending on whether you go to Drudge or Newscorp approved sources.

Failure for Romney to properly define himself, in a positive way, in regards to economic issue, will result in a distraction becoming how Romney gets defined.  Thing is that, bad economy alone isn't going to be enough.  Romney has to show something why he is better.  Failure to do so means people don't see him as a viable option.  And what was learned from 2004, is that you don't just go "ANYONE but the sitting president".  That doesn't work. If one wants to compare Obama to Carter, the Romney has to be Reagan, and what had happened from 2001-2009 has to be forgotten.  The current Washington climate consisted of tax cuts and more tax cuts, and also a belief that it was deregulation that caused the financial mess.  Romney not being Reagan, failure to persuade people that we need a LOT less government (Reagan ran on this), in addition to bad economic news (NOT coming out of Europe) but linked to Democrats in Washington, is what could tip it.  But it can't be Romney as John Kerry going: I am NOT current president, vote for me.  Most people believe America is in the economic mess it is in because of the last administration.  If Romney is seen as more of the same, and that is very possible, then it doesn't help.

You're missing the point.  You're over-estimating how much people - even those who vote GOP but aren't close followers of politics - knwo about Romney.  Romney as a candidate can still be defined as he's "new", at least to most voters.  Obama is NOT new.  He's a knwonw quantity at this point.  

And if you look closely, you'll see plenty of conservative critics of Romney, particularly in four areas:  1.  Mormonism,  2. tax returns,  3.  reliability/credibility (particularly in conservative cred.) and 4.  likeability.   The Bain issue plays heavily into the last two - -areas where he needs to improve even for his own base voter.  That's a problem unlike many of the attacks on Obama, which, true or not, simply aren't an issue for his base.  No enthusaistic progressive voter, for example, questions his citizenship or his patriotism or his integrity.  The GOP attacks in those areas do every little beyond motivating the right-wing base to get fired up.  They do little to move the middle.  I'd argue Bain (and more importantly the "trust" issue that accompanies Bain) plays much more successfully to the middle ground (and there's more substance to it, as the story develops this week.)  

And don't underestimate the importance of laying this groundwork early in the campaign.  Obama has enough money to follow up, and I'd be willing ot bet they have something to add to this issue that they'll drop, oh, about a week after the GOP convention/VP introduction.   It's sort of how these things go, historically.  Lay the groundwork on the challenger early in key states, then hammer away nationwide the last 10 weeks at an expanded version of that issue.  

the idea that there is anything close to free market capitalism right now in America is ridiculous.  None of this would have been allowed to happen in free market capitalism.  Government and the fed literally control the entire economy.  All markets care about anymore is fed policy and how that will effect future stock market prices.  If people didn't expect future fed intervention we would see a collapse right now.  If the fed didn't intervene we would have deflation and interest rates around 7% at this point.  The markets have been punished over and over again for selling by the fed, and they don't even bother anymore.  They just know that the fed won't even allow it to go below a certain point anymore.  This doesn't mean it is a good thing, it just means the correction in the future is getting bigger and bigger.

As far as Bain goes, the idea that you could ever calculate how getting rid of a job and selling capital in one area translates into another is just impossible.  People who create jobs don't create jobs because they want to, they create them in search of profits for themselves.  If people can't see long term, then they will be punished in the future, that's the whole point.  If you aren't smart enough to allocate capital wisely, then you lose money.  There is not a more efficient way to do it.  Government sure as hell isn't gonna do it efficiently in almost all sectors.  The whole point is that if Bain has no success, they wouldn't be hired in the first place.  If these jobs were productive jobs, Bain wouldn't have been called in the first place.  Companies getting broken up that aren't productive is necessary, and it frees up capital and labor to be used elsewhere.  That's the economy at it's most basic level.

Except you're forgetting that Obama ate dog. 

On the first point, I am a critic of the Fed.  I am informed by Austrian Economics, and have issues with Fed.  Heck, I have issues with the entire financial/economic system and it being entirely debt based for that batter.  I deviate from pure Austrian economics, because I believe that bubbles seen aren't only by government intervention, but can happen on their own to.  I am of the belief that the debt being run is a core part of the problem.  And this debt issue is why theren't isn't deflation, as it would kill the economy as people wouldn't be able to service the debt.  

On the second point, that is part of the core of the problem, and you can connect it with the first.  One can go, "Well, these natural economic corrections, and people blindly following self-interest without any degree of coordinating, or putting into law lessons learned from the past is the best way." can be seen as fine, but then what happens when you effectively have the unemployment rate getting to 25%, and there are mass amounts of people sliding to the bottom.  People aren't allowed to do Hoovervilles, and so on.  When small things go large scale, people expect the problems to go away.  The social contract calls for this.  And this is where government gets involved.  When you have idiots who mad bad decisions and have lots of money, they affect people who have far less control.  And in this is another question: What is the optimal level of punishment for failure?  Should like 1/3 of the population have its life savings wiped out?  Should such things cause a spiral to happen that people die?  Is there a call for society as a whole, or society having the government step in to provide a safety net?  Or does the failure call for people actually dying in sufficient numbers, so that future generations learn not to go there?  And who says that such would be learned?

All these questions in the end are what is being asked, and do link to this election.

i posted that video because of how hilarious it was, the media bending over backwards to defend obama. 

also with all the government grants and loans and special treatment GE gets, and over half the workforce is foreign; its obama with the outsourcing problem.