Yesterday’s media blitz (interviews with each of 5 television networks, answering questions about his involvement with Bain Capital after Feb. 1999) by Mitt Romney demonstrated two things:
- The Romney campaign really wants this story to go away, and;
- This story isn’t going away.
It isn’t going away because, as President Obama said in his own TV interview, “I think most Americans figure if you are the chairman, C.E.O. and president of a company that you are responsible for what that company does. Ultimately, Mr. Romney, I think, is going to have to answer those questions.”
Yep, I think so too.
But whenever Romney finally does answer those questions, there’s another, related, and politically damaging set of questions he’ll have to answer about his tax returns.
And the first question is: where are they?
Earlier this year, Romney released his 2010 tax return which showed he’s a really rich guy, with lots of overseas investments, who pays taxes at a lower rate than scads of people who have to work for a living. He’s said he’ll release his 2011 tax return too (once his accountants finish working on it)…but nothing more.
The Obama campaign has helpfully released 12 years of tax returns from Pres. Obama and Vice-Pres. Biden. Ever since presidential candidate George Romney released 12 years of his tax returns in 1967 (because “one year could be a fluke, perhaps done for show…”), it’s become commonplace for presidential nominees to release several years of tax returns. (Obama released 8 years of returns in 2008.)
Four years ago, Mitt Romney reportedly turned over 23 years of tax returns to the McCain campaign when he was “under consideration” as a vice-presidential candidate to run with McCain. (Note: “under consideration” is in quotation marks because it was common knowledge on the campaign trail that McCain despised Romney and wanted nothing to do with him.) As TPM’s Brian Beutler observes, MSNBC commentator (and former McCain campaign strategist) Steve Schmidt is a voice worth listening for in the coming days and weeks on this issue. Schmidt likely knows—or at least has a pretty good idea—what is in those returns.
It’s not helpful for the Romney campaign—in fact, it’s a sign of the weakness of their position—to have senior Republican leaders like Rep. Pete Sessions saying “His personal finances, the way he does things, his record, are fair game.”
Pete Sessions isn’t a maverick like North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones, or a semi-disgraced former party leader like Michael Steele (both of whom have called on Romney to release several years of tax returns). Sessions is an eight-term Texas Republican incumbent who won re-election with 63% of the vote in 2010. His peers chose him to chair the National Republican Congressional Committee, the fundraising and campaign arm of the Republican Party for House races. He’s on the House Rules Committee. He’s a well-established and trusted party leader.
If Pete Sessions is saying publicly that Romney’s taxes are “fair game”, then a lot of other influential Republicans are saying it privately—to each other and to the Romney campaign.
And that’s tomorrow’s news today.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…………..
Makes you wonder whether the people who know what’s in those returns are trying to derail Romney before the nomination? Because if there’s some really bad stuff he’s hiding, the resultant surge to Obama could wipe out a lot of Republicans downticket.
Not sure there’s anyone that both knows what’s in those tax returns and has an interest in derailing Romney’s nomination.
I said it before and I am now saying it again:
O’Bomber has dob=ne a fait to middling job as the front man for the Permanent Government. Why change horses in midstream? Why change hoses in mid-spray?
They have to have a “campaign.”
It’s whut ‘Murricans do every four years or so.
But they don’t have to have a new frontman.
Four more years to get the job done.
What job?
The end of the American dream of (
personal freedom and) independence and the beginning of the real “1984.”Watch.
AG
.
Inspiring. I saw her interview on satellite tv and was impressed. Do artists have a sixth sense on how society develops before the nerds screw up? Diane von Furstenberg on China, the Land of Opportunity.
On a Green Society, Germany and China seems to be the leading countries on the next great economic and industrial revolution based on sustainable energy. The US is seen as holding on to oil refineries, turning up empty handed in the end. Vote for Mitt, vote for oil.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Just curious, when did the PermaGov form? When did they start the job of securing “the end of the American dream of independence and the beginning of the real ‘1984’”?
(Serious questions.)
i would say just after WWII, when the OSS fairly rapidly morphed into an uncontrollable, top-secret organization and started to spread its tentacles throughout the whole culture.
Media, finance, politics…the works. No one…no one outside of the inner circles of the intelligence system as it now stands anyway, and quite likely not even the people at the top…no one actually knows how much money (and thus power) has flowed into the various legal, not-so-legal and just plain criminal organizations and shell companies that are involved in this game. It has become a hydra-headed monster with a life of its own, so much that it has gotten to the point where many of the various heads of that monster have developed conflicting views and goals of heir own.
The one thing upon which they all agree is that they do not want to be publicly identified as what they really are. No, they’re just (pick some):
Businessmen
Soldiers
Editors
Reporters
Academics
Politicians
and so on.
The Permanent Government of the Untied States of Omertica.
Mum’s the word.
Bet on it.
AG
.
As the Nation developed, “PermaGov” grew proportionately from local and state level to national and international in the aftermath of Worl War II and the start of the Cold War. Not in the least by covert Operation Paperclip to invite Nazi scientists to the Nation. PermaGov got a great boost during the Bush years and continues under Obama.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."And…in reply to both massappeal and Oui….the first person of national stature to warn us about this problem was President Dwight David Eisenhower, a military man of the Pre-PermaGov period.
(From Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation on January 17, 1961.)
Yup.
Loud and clear.
But not loud enough.
The PermaGov noise machine blotted it out, just as it has blotted out…and continues to blot out…so many of its crimes and so many of its critics.
So it goes, and…for those who do not understand what is, has and will continue to happen if it is not stopped…
(A modern day Paul Revere would have shouted this from his horse.)
Bet on it.
Later…
AG