it's a pretty honorable industry, and I don't know why people aren't stepping up and defending the careers that define their lives. That's a sad thing. What do they fear it will cost them?" Mr. Levy, who voted for President Obama in 2008, is right. Virtually none of the big names in private equity have spoken up to defend the industry. Over the past several weeks, anytime my colleagues or I have sought comment about attacks on the industry, private equity's kingpins have declined. (The industry's lobbying group, the Private Equity Growth Capital Council, has been working behind the scenes to shore up support and plans a more public campaign in the coming weeks, but with none of the leading private equity executives playing a significant role.) Of course, it is not a secret that the private equity industry has an image problem, crystallized by the robber baron Gordon Gekko character in "Wall Street" in 1987. That view was reinvigorated almost 20 years later in 2006 when BusinessWeek wrote a cover article with the headline " Buy It, Strip It, Then Flip It ." Now it is being underscored again with the release of "When Mitt Romney Came to Town ," an anti-Romney mock documentary riddled with factual errors that was financed by a "super PAC" in support of Newt Gingrich . You can clearly debate the merits of private equity -- the outsize fees, the debt, the special tax treatment for executives. But there seems to be a fundamental