Mitt Romney has every right to cloak his personal and professional finances in secrecy — and voters have every right to assume he has something embarrassing to hide. If this seems unfair, Romney has only himself to blame.
Through a series of miscalculations, Romney has managed to turn what should have been a minor hiccup into what may be a defining moment, and not in a good way. Attacks by President Obama's campaign serve mainly to draw attention to the train wreck.
On the Sunday morning talk shows, even Republicans urged Romney to release more tax returns while wondering what secrets he's trying to keep. And the campaign's latest attempt to explain how and when Romney left Bain Capital — he's supposed to have "retired retroactively" at some unspecified date — became an instant punch line.
If Romney really does have the power to bend time and space, he might want to retroactively clean up the mess he's made.
The only reason anyone cares when Romney left Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded and ran, is because Romney made a totally unreasonable claim: When Democrats pointed to outsourcing and job cuts at companies Bain owned or controlled, Romney denied any responsibility since these unfortunate developments took place after he left to run the Winter Olympics in 1999.
This was an absurd position to take. Romney has boasted of his prowess at creating jobs by pointing to successful companies in which Bain invested, such as Staples, the office-supply chain that went on to expand and hire tens of thousands of employees. But much of this growth took place after 1999. Romney was trying to take credit for post-departure successes but not for failures.
On such shaky ground, Romney planted his flag.
He then tried to insist on another ridiculous proposition, which is that he left Bain suddenly and completely in 1999. This cannot possibly be true. Romney was Bain Capital — chairman, chief executive and sole stockholder. There is no way he could have disentangled himself from the firm so abruptly.
Indeed, he did not. As late as 2002, Bain's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission list Romney as chairman, chief executive and sole stockholder.
If you look at Romney's signature on those documents and listen to what he's been saying on the campaign trail, you have to conclude that either he lied to the SEC or he's lying to voters now.
Romney's defenders have had to fall back to the position that the SEC doesn't really expect companies to file accurate information. So, all you corporate compliance officers, take the day off!
All of this flows from a fundamental misrepresentation: Bain Capital's purpose wasn't to create jobs, it was to create wealth. If Romney had spoken honestly from the beginning about his company's goals and actions, his campaign surrogates wouldn't have to be out there trying to explain how retroactive retirement works.
Maybe a little early candor would also have made the question of Romney's personal income tax returns a nonissue. Then again, maybe not.
Romney has spent the better part of a decade running for president. Did it never occur to him that if he ever won the Republican nomination, surely there would come a time when he was under pressure to release multiple years' worth of tax returns?
Did he think everyone would forget that it was his own father, George Romney, who set the modern standard for financial disclosure? Did he not recall that when he was being considered for the vice presidential nod four years ago, he furnished tax returns spanning more than two decades to the John McCain campaign?
Clearly, he knew the subject would come up. The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that Romney believes that while stonewalling on his taxes may cost him some support, releasing them would cost him more.
Some conservatives are becoming restive; Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, for example, said Sunday it was "crazy" for Romney not to release more than the one tax return he has grudgingly surrendered.
If Romney is trying to hide something, what might it be? Could there have been more offshore accounts? Some additional undisclosed mansions? Might Romney have made some kind of profitable — but impolitic — bet against the U.S. economy?
Going out of your way to invite this kind of speculation, as Romney is doing, seems an awfully unpromising campaign strategy.
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Comments » 21
acerbas writes:
Romney's got a lot to be embarrassed about, as he seems to recognize himself as he bars the press from taking pictures of him with his neo-con advisors.
http://www.care2.com/causes/media-bar...
After Hubris Comes Nemesis
~ Byron King, Whiskey and Gunpowder
acerbas writes:
The Selling of American Democracy: http://robertreich.org/post/27128864190
"How we dare even prate about democracy is beyond me. Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale. It's far worse than anything that occurred in the Roman empire, until the praetorian guard started to sell the principate. We're not a democracy, and we have absolutely nothing to give the world in the way of political ideas or political arrangements. God knows, the mention of justice is like a clove of garlic to Count Dracula."
~ Gore Vidal
ron805 writes:
It's all bogus crap generated by the Obama campaign. The only thing at issue this year is Obama, his incompetence, his disdain for the Constitution, the corrupt people he's surrounded himself with, and his countless lies.
ron805 writes:
You're rigt (name calling removed), we're not a democracy, we're a democratic republic. Vidal was a radical leftist of no import.
ENVIROSCIGUY writes:
If Romney were given "truth serum" and asked, "Would you prefer America as a Democracy or a Meritocracy?" I am SURE he would choose the latter. http://books.google.com/books?id=Saxf...
ENVIROSCIGUY writes:
PS: The term "Meritocracy" was coined as a satirical word used for the British oligarchy by Michael Young. He describes a dystopian 2034 similar to Orwell's dystopian "Engsoc" from 1984. I think it's a good read (before "Twilight of the Elites". http://books.google.com/books?id=e_rT...
ENVIROSCIGUY writes:
To be honest, I think it's FACTUAL CRAP. He's not going to be charged with a felony. He's going to release "revised" tax returns (after his accountants make a few "adjustments" and re-file amended papers). He was not "running" Bain while they were paying him "only" $100k.
The bigger issue is the fate of our democracy. Thank you Acerbas for your poignant link and quote. Ron 805 is just trying to cover up for not ever reading Gore Vidal's masterpieces of literature and social commentary. Neocons often get upset when we quote "liberal propaganda" (aka BOOKS we read in college!)
Lets_Be_Truthful writes:
None of this changes the fact that after November our country will still be in the same ..... it is now. One can say we need to change it from the top down but changing it from the bottom up might last longer.
ENVIROSCIGUY writes:
The BIG change might come after November, when one of the "liberal" SCOTUS judges retires or dies. Who would Romney appoint (WWRA)?
Chilibreath writes:
All this hoopla about Romney and his taxes are just another attempt by the liberal media to muddy the waters in defense of Bammy the Clown. More to the point, how does being a community organizer (whatever the heck that is) qualify someone for the highest office in the land? Answer: it doesn't, but as everyone knows a willing and fawning media can sell refrigerators to Eskimos, so I guess the uninformed masses will just continue to believe what they are spoon fed on TV and via their local fish wrappers. The only good news is, thank god, Bammy can only serve two terms!
rationalthinker writes:
It is time for the right to be candid with itself. Willard was and is the outsourcer in chief. Expect the following to come out in the next days & weeks. During his much vaunted time at the Salt Lake Olympics he outsourced contract work to the detriment of American workers. But the real scandal is going to be his blatant violation of law in outsourcing that Olympic Committee contract work to factories in Myanmar which were employing what is essentially slave labor. Willard aspires to be "da Massa" to a terrorized labor force. No one paying attention would be surprised at that. His biggest financial supporter, Sheldon Adelson is involved in the procurement and pimping of enslaved sex workers in Macau and elsewhere.
The tax returns are salient because they will almost certainly disclose self dealing and crony profiteering benefits from the slave factories to Willard. Romney doesn't want the public to see the sources of his blood income. That's what he is hiding. It's no coinkydink that he provided all the now withheld returns to McCain & didn't get the nod. McCain may have been dumb [as evidenced by his assent to Sarah] but he wasn't totally brain dead. Romney is a walking scandal and he has only just begun to bleed.
eng42 writes:
It is really lame to say Obama was nothing but a community organizer.
He graduated from Columbia university with a degree in political science and a specialty in international relations. Sounds like a pretty good foundation for a politician.
. After he graduated he worked for a year at the Business International Corporation, then at the New York Public Interest Research Group. Two years after graduating, Obama was hired in Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman and Riverdale) on Chicago's far South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988. During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from one to thirteen. He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens .
. It was so challenging that Obama realized he could not accomplish what needed to be done without becoming a lawyer. So he went Harvard Law school and became a lawyer.h He was so good he was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year and president of the journal in his second year. During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as an associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990.
He then served as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years—as a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and as a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004—teaching constitutional law
Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, succeeding State Senator Alice Palmer as Senator from Illinois's 13th District, which at that time spanned Chicago South Side neighborhoods from Hyde Park – Kenwood south to South Shore and west to Chicago Lawn0. Once elected, Obama gained bipartisan support for legislation reforming ethics and health care laws. He sponsored a law increasing tax credits for low-income workers, negotiated welfare reform, and promoted increased subsidies for childcare. In 2001, as co-chairman of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, Obama supported Republican Governor Ryan's payday loan regulations and predatory mortgage lending regulations aimed at averting home foreclosures.
Obama was reelected to the Illinois Senate in 1998, defeating Republican Yesse Yehudah in the general election, and was reelected again in 2002.
eng42 writes:
In January 2003, Obama became chairman of the Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services Committee when Democrats, after a decade in the minority, regained a majority. He sponsored and led unanimous, bipartisan passage of legislation to monitor racial profiling by requiring police to record the race of drivers they detained, and legislation making Illinois the first state to mandate videotaping of homicide interrogations. During his 2004 general election campaign for U.S. Senate, police representatives credited Obama for his active engagement with police organizations in enacting death penalty reforms.
GuideDog writes:
Mitt Romney is the worst Presidential nominee by a major political party since Michael Dukakis.
ridgewalker_101 writes:
Shame on you Mitt for running a succesful business and getting rich. That makes you a terrible person.
Obama, you are great for investing taxpayer money in Solyndra. Too bad it failed at least you gave it a try.
/ off
ridgewalker_101 writes:
In his most recent financial disclosure from 2011, Obama and his wife reported having between $200,000 and $450,000 in the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, which invests in the largest U.S. corporations. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, as of Sept. 30, 2011, the fund’s biggest holding was 8,272,039 shares of Apple Inc., then valued at $3.2 billion.
The New York Times reported in January:
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas….
“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.
“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”
The mutual fund that the Obamas have invested in also held 94,582,281 million shares of General Electric, valued at $1.4 billion, as of the SEC filing. The multinational conglomorate has a long history of outsourcing – according to a new book cited by the New York Times, in 1989, “G.E. became the first U.S. company to outsource software work to India.” Obama also has close ties to GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, who was appointed as chairman of his outside panel of economic advisers last year.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-h...
eng42 writes:
You really can't tell the difference between investing in a mutual fund and running a company?
ridgewalker_101 writes:
Yeah, I can tell the difference. Both made or are making money from offshoring which is the correct term. What is your argument?
sslocal writes:
And I can tell you that Mittens did a wonderful job at Bain.
I just find it remakable that the left can lie through their collective teeth about the job Mittens did but for some reason they remain blind when it comes to what Uncle Barry has done, or rather what he hasn't done.
You guys never fail to make me laugh. You could be funny if the situation wasn't so serious.
Forever_Young writes:
How do you spell incompetence? O-b-a-m-a
raylaw43#321876 writes:
Willard made himself a box and he is trapped in it.
In 1999, he was sole shareholder and CEO of Bain, but he had ambitions to be Mass. governor and then President. To be Mass. governor, he had to be a Mass. resident. But to run the Salt Lake Olympics from 1999, for 16 hours/day, living in Salt Lake, he would be a Utah resident.
Bain is in Boston. By staying CEO of Bain and drawing a salary, and with a house in Boston, he could claim Mass. residence.
Thus, in 1999, he could not resign and be a passive investor in Bain and stay a resident of Mass. He had to be active and draw a salary.
Willard either lied on his SEC filings, lied on his FEC disclosure forms or lied on his campaign documents filed to be governor of Mass. He cannot have it all three ways.
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