An Unbelievable Proposition
An Unbelievable Proposition
It's the sort of thing you take with a grain of salt because, to the one, it is pretty much unbelievable. And, to the other, it comes from Huffington Post.
Abby Huntsman and Ryan Grim report:
Mitt Romney has been determined to resist releasing his tax returns at least since his bid for Massachusetts governor in 2002 and has been confident that he will never be forced to do so, several current and former Bain executives tell The Huffington Post. Had he thought otherwise, say the sources based on their longtime understanding of Romney, he never would have gone forward with his run for president.
See, the thing is, I have nothing against HuffPo.
But I also understand it plays the liberal side of the aisle. And, yes, that paragraph is, on its face, very nearly beyond belief. Between the source and the sheer insanity of the idea, I can understand that the fact of HuffPo reporting it will be a strike against the story.
But is it even
possible that Mitt Romney would not have run for president if he thought he would have to release his tax returns?
Is it possible that the Republican nominee for president is so ineffably naîve?
"Rumors on what unknown people who Mitt Romney may not have ever met muse about what someone else, also unknown, told them should not justify a story," explained Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul.
Editorial cartoonist
David Horsey attempts to distill the underlying question:
Mitt Romney’s income tax returns may contain some surprises that he does not want the world to know about, but they are hardly his only secrets. His biggest secret, the question he has not answered through the entire campaign, the one that bothers conservatives even more than it irks liberals, is this: Does he believe in anything besides Mormonism and money?
As unbelievable as the proposition might be, the one thing that gives it credibility is Mitt Romney himself.
To wit, Republicans are much better than Democrats at devising and playing long strategies. It is not impossible to imagine the GOP tanking an election if they think they can get what they want without winning. But even in that scenario, there
must be a limit. And the Party seems to be at its limit. To the one, this is a
presidential election. The gamble of screwing the Democrats out of the White House for twenty years by stonewalling Obama for eight is a crazy risk assessment, because there is a possibility that the president will still outmaneuver conservatives, especially if he is no longer constrained by electoral concerns. So the idea of tanking a presidential election is somewhere between insane and impossible.
Prominent Republicans are now calling on Mitt Romney to release his tax returns, yet the nominee seems to be holding firm.
According to Huntsman and Grim, "Underlying the resistance, sources close to him say, is Romney's belief that voters simply don't have a right to see what should be private financial information."
That doesn't even begin to make sense given Romney's
demands of prior opponents to release their tax returns.
Perhaps the insanity of the situation is best framed by
Syzygys' point:
Syzygys said:
The common assumption is that he has 1-2 years of close to zero taxes, when in 2009 he used losses to offset his gains. Even if this is perfectly legal, a multimillionaire not paying taxes doesn't sound good to many people...
Even so, at this point the damage Romney has done to himself by refusing to release the returns far outweighs the hit he would have taken in the news cycle over documentation of what we already knew, which is that he's a greedy capitalist.
I mean, sure, this is a tough year for the corporate raider to appeal to the so-called Ninety-Nine Percent, but had Romney released his returns during the primary, the "scandal", such as it would have been, would be over. Well, it would be over if the only problem was that he played legal but distasteful maneuvers to reduce his tax burden.
At this point, I'm starting to wonder if the Romney campaign is hoping someone will try to hack the records and release them to the public, so he can play the role of victim.
Right. Go ahead and laugh. That's just as crazy as the rest of it.
But
what is the problem? At some point, the political argument that there must be something actually
criminal in those records is going to gain legitimate traction in the discourse.
But barring actual criminality, it is hard to see what could be in those returns that would do more damage than this ongoing melodrama.
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Notes:
Huntsman, Abby and Ryan Grim. "Mitt Romney Never Thought He'd Have To Release Tax Returns: Bain Sources". The Huffington Post. July 18, 2012. HuffingtonPost.com. July 19, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/18/mitt-romney-tax-returns_n_1682539.html
Horsey, David. "Mitt Romney's secrets are not all in his tax returns". Top of the Ticket. July 19, 2012. LATimes.com. July 19, 2012. http://www.latimes.com/news/politic...a-tt-romneys-secrets-20120718,0,1392391.story
