Is Steve Pagliuca The Next Senator from Massachusetts?
Yesterday afternoon, I tweeted my surprise that "some self-funded biz type isn't jumping into the Mass senate race on the Dem side." Apparently Bain Capital's Steve Pagliuca is one of my followers, because news leaked several hours later that he was seriously considering a run at Ted Kennedy's vacated seat. I'm told that candidate Pagliuca is a near-certainty, which raises two questions: (1) How will this affect Bain; and (2) Does he have a shot to win? The first answer is "relatively little." Bain has lots of experience with this sort of thing, based on the electoral ambitions of firm co-founder Mitt Romney. In fact, Romney's first race was for this very seat, against Kennedy back in 1994. That campaign included the regular apparences of laid-off factory workers from a Bain portfolio company, who were none too pleased with the future governor. When Romney ran for president, Bain conducted an in-house investigation to uncover any skeletons from the Romney era (PR or otherwise) that might have embarassed the firm. Expect Bain to do the same again, but for the more recent era.
