Andrew Sabl’s Washington Monthly post, “Why Republicans Are In a Box: Their Base, and Nobody Else, Trusts Big Business” helps to explain why Romney is getting so little traction from bragging about his business leadership experience. As Sable explains:

Mitt Romney has a similar problem regarding Bain. According to a Gallup survey from a few weeks ago, only 21 percent of Americans feel “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in business. (Here’s Gallup’s discussion with some historical averages; here’s a bar graph. And by the way, I’m glad that Gallup combines the results for “a great deal” and “quite a lot” since I don’t see a clear difference between the two.) But big business is the institution whose levels of trust show the greatest partisan differences. Fully 39 percent of Republicans proclaim the highest level of trust, but only 11 percent of Democrats–and, very important, only 15 percent of independents.
…Republicans–especially rich Sun Belt Republicans–generally think that big business is doing fine by America and can be counted on to continue to do fine. They’re astonished that anybody would call fairly standard corporate practices “the problem” rather than the solution. And they would probably hit back hard against Romney’s campaign if he tried to distance himself from those practices (not that he could easily do so!). But in feeling this way they are badly, perhaps fatally, out of touch.

Considering all of the economic fallout from the Bush meltdown, the Citizens United decision and other corporate scandals of recent years, how could it be otherwise?