How Mitt’s Tax Returns Show His Character Defect
by Michael Tomasky
August 7, 2012
What earthly power can make Mitt Romney release his tax returns? None whatsoever. Incredible as it may seem, it’s true: He can go all the way to November 6 without giving an inch, and there’s not one thing anyone can do about it. He pretty obviously thinks that the heat he’s taking for sitting on the returns is more bearable than the heat he’d have to endure by releasing them. And that calculation says something astonishing about the man, and ultimately, that is the issue here—this is far more about Romney’s character than it is about the money per se. And character is very quickly becoming the issue that the Obama camp hadn’t even planned on exploiting but now must, because Romney’s lack of it has become so obvious.
So why hasn’t he? There are just two possible explanations.
The first is that—and liberals and Democrats must bear this in mind—Romney might do just that. That is, maybe the information in the returns is embarrassing but no more than that, and Romney is just stringing everyone along. Say they reveal that Romney paid 11 percent or 9 percent or even 7 percent some years. That’s bad for him politically, but it’s not a nuclear bomb. And indeed, given how dark the speculation is right now about how whatever is in there must be terrible, this would be a pretty brilliant strategy: Let everything build to a fever pitch, with melodramatic speculation, and then, if the released returns reveal anything less serious than Reid’s charge (no taxes for a number of years), the media will decide that the Democrats overhyped the story.
OK. It’s a possibility. But it isn’t likely. Nothing about the way Romney comports himself suggests the above. That little chuckle of his is always the giveaway that he’s nervous. It’s the chuckle that came out involuntarily when ABC’s David Muir interviewed him on the subject in Israel, and it brings us to the other and more likely possibility—that something is very wrong indeed in the returns. So wrong, in fact, that he’d rather go through 13 more weeks of this than budge an inch.
Think about it. Through a week of a Democratic convention, when his tax returns will be mentioned by speaker after speaker. Through the early fall campaigning. Through the debates, when he will again say that he feels he’s revealed all he needs to reveal. Through the campaign’s final, home-stretch weeks. If he hasn’t released more returns, then by mid-October, this will be one of three main things the average American knows about Mitt Romney: that he’s rich, that he’s running for president, and that he won’t release his tax returns.
Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/08/07/michael-tomasky-how-mitt-s-tax-return-show-his-character-defect.html
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