One really wonders what the Romney camp are thinking. The writing has been on the wall ever since Gingrich labelled him as a vulture venture capitalist. (See Blog 1/13/12 Romney Wounded and Bleeding). At that stage the "Anyone But Romney" mood was the vogue with Romney getting 25% of the Republican Primary vote and consistently running second to the "Anyone but Romney" candidate du jour. Romney had no answer to the Bain attacks then and he has none now
Romney elected to run on his Bain business experience and should have had all the angles covered on his tenure with Bain then and if he didn't he has had over 6 months to get them down pat. Obama has merely taken up where Gingrich, Perry, Santorum et al left off. Obama has even been joined by respected Republican columnists such as George Will and the Republican Governor of Alabama who have all told Romney to produce all the documents being asked of him including his last 12 years tax returns.
Team Obama have taken a leaf out of the Karl Rove, (Bush's Brain), playbook. They have attacked Romney on his supposed business strength much as George 43 attacked Kerry on his supposed military service strength. The advantage that the Obama team has over Rove is that Rove and the swift boaters largely had to write the narrative about Kerry and then attack it while Romney has created his own narrative. The Obama ad about Romney outsourcing jobs at Bain and investing in tax havens while singing America the Brave is devastating .
ROMNEY NARRATIVE
Romney has maintained that his Bain experience qualifies him to be President. America is in a financial mess and needs a businessman to bail it out. He is a succesful businessman who made pots of money at Bain so he is your man. Q. E. D.
The only problem is that Romney made money for himself mostly at the expense of the American worker and American taxpayer. All team Obama has to do is to detail how he did it. As JAY H. ELL opined in an earlier blog, Romney is a poster child for everything Obama wanted to run against.
He fired workers and he said he enjoyed firing. The latter in another context but the damage was already done. He has money in tax havens such as the Cayman Islands and Swiss Banks. He paid less tax than most in the middle class. He outsourced jobs oversea. All of this was legitimate and legal, Senator Lindsay Graham, a Romney defender maintained. "The tax system is there to be gamed". One can hardly as a patriotic American run on "Let's all game the System".
EVERYONE IS ADDING TO THE NARRATIVE
There is a narrative around the narrative on the tax returns. What can there be in them that makes Romney defy the cardinal rule of a cause celebre? - Get the disputed documents as fast as possible and control the damage. Some speculate that it is payments from Bain when he supposedly was no longer working for them. (His retrospective resignation from Bain was hardly a show stopper). Others say there even more "unpatriotic" investments than have been released already.
Maybe he should have payed more taxes? There is speculation that he used the $35 million spent on the 2008 Presidential Campaign as a tax deduction which would be illegal. Romney made 100's of millions of dollars and maybe every cent was structured in a way to pay as little tax as possible.
There is a complicated theory put forward by the tax lawyer, Mark Maremont, whereby Romney may have created two types of shares for Bain. He put his potentially highest capital gain shares in his untaxed Retirement Account and the more low risk ones in his ordinary account. (The latter guaranteed that he would never loose on the deal regardless of outcome). So whatever happened he could not loose and if he hit the Jackpot, which he often did, gigantic sums accumulated tax free in his Retirement Account.
Then there is Joshua Green of Bloomberg Finance who says that maybe Romney lost so much in the crash in 2008 that he carried forward his losses to 2009 and paid NO Federal taxes in that year. This theory has lead to speculation that maybe in that crash he went short on the House mortgages or bet on the bank bail outs cashing in hugely on everyone's misery.
Whatever the reason(s) Romney appears to be prepared, for the moment, to risk his Presidential chances on not releasing his tax returns. He is defiant. He really should reconsider. I cannot believe that the real story can be as bad as all of this.
So in the teeth of bad unemployment numbers the story is still Romney, his taxes and his version of capitalism.
ROMNEY CAN'T GET OUT OF HIS OWN WAY
Romney insists on defining himself to suit Obama's election manifesto. He attacked Obama for bailing out the motor car industry. That really doesn't go down too well in the Midwest swing states where the Motor Industry is concentrated.
Meanwhile Romney squirms and whines. "Obama should fight on the issues not just smear him - Obama should apologize - Romney may have been nominally head and CEO of Bain drawing a salary but wasn't running Bain when the outsourcing occured - John Kerry's wife didn't show her tax returns!" His final stance is that he will not apologize for being a successful business man.
Obama just ups the ante by maintaining that Romney will create 800,000 jobs if he becomes President - all outsourced oversea by doing away with the tax on companies' foreign earnings - Romney would not be the Commander in Chief he would be the Outsourcer in Chief.
What is coming up next will be the issue of financial regulation which Obama is "for" and Romney is "against". This has to be a key issue in the light of the unfolding Libor scandal where the unregulated financial institutions once again proved that they need to be regulated. This has the makings of a long long story with mortgages, pension funds, cities and states loosing money while the trusted financial institutions, (the job creators), played monopoly with real property, (other peoples).
There is also in the wings the Ryan budget that Romney has signed onto. That budget is not exactly being trotted out by the Republicans will be introduced by the Obama campaign. As far as they are concerned another gift. For starters it gets rid of Medicare and Medicaid as it exists today.
WHAT HAS ROMNEY GOING FOR HIM?
1. In spite of all of this Romney is still in the game. He is nothing if not resilient and he is not far behind Obama in the national polls.
" It is the economy stupid".
2. Romney has pots and pots of money with which he hopes to drown out the narrative he has created for himself. He has all the so called "interest" and "support" groups that are allowed, anonymously, to spend and collect unlimited sums of money to further his cause. There are endless corporations and institutions who are really Romney's main constituency. They are ready to make the "investment" to continue on in their merry way. Do the Oil Companies, for example, really want to loose their lucrative research and development subsidies?
3. He has history on his side. No incumbent has won reelection with the unemployment number above 8%. Romney is calling Obamacare a tax increase even though he steadfastly maintained that Romneycare wasn't. He thinks that it is a winning issue for him.
4. The Republican State legislatures are trying to even out the demographic that is working against Romney by changing voter registration laws that will make it harder for the poor, Hispanics and African Americans to vote.
5. He can inspire with his Vice Presidential choice but the odds are he will go true to form and name someone who is a white male lackluster candidate. They keep mentioning Condie Rice who keeps putting the kybosh on the idea. Anyway she is pro choice, like Romney used to be, and he needs that like a hole in his head.
6. Obama has not exactly a stellar economic record to run on. "Yes We Can" has morphed into "Forward". The starry eyed base is not nearly so worked up. For a large part of his Presidency he tried unsuccessfully to compromise with the Republicans. (See Blog, 12/7/10, "Obama - From "Yes we can" to "Yes we cave"). Obama turned out to be a far more inspiring candidate than he was a President. Such is the reality of politics.
7. At the end of the day Romney will have all the money and that he believes could win it for him. His support groups are said to be buying all the TV time in the swing states for August and October. In fact this has really made team Obama quite agitated and they have been sending out e -mail after email every day pleading for money.
However the debates are usually the most watched adverts and they are for free. Romney was pretty uninspiring in the Republican debates. Here he is up against Obama in an area that is his forte. Also the moderators' questions have to bring up all his narratives again and that cannot be something that he is looking forward to.
Objectively, the Republicans have to be pretty desperate and there are even murmurings that Romney is only the "presumptive" nominee and maybe the convention could pull a rabbit out of the hat. Now that would be a real miracle!
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