Just collateral damage.
So lets recap, Clear Channel is losing a large slice of advertising revenue for a broadcaster they are paying $38 million a year. The company has a market cap of $5.5 billion, and $19 billion in debt. Despite a junk bond rating, the company is planning to borrow another $2.2 billion to pay a $2 billion dividend to Bain Capital. That will leave the company with a market cap of $3.3 billion, and $21.2 billion in debt with $4 billion due in 2014 and another $12 billion up to 2016.
And don't forget that in the increasingly likely case that these Vampire Capital tactics put Clear Channel into bankruptcy, Chapter 11 will allow the same management team who engineered it to stay in control and later find a new clutch of investors to bilk.
So the answer to my question in the subject line turns out to be "no": Mitt Romney's Bain capital looks like it was doing a fine job of destroying Clear Channel all on its own. But Limbaugh's bigotry and the advertiser boycott he brought on himself might well turn out to be the final straw.