I am going to address this to the American people, whether they be conservatives or liberals or something in between. Back in April, the Washington Post reported that Mitt Romney had turned over twenty-three years of tax returns to John McCain’s vice-presidential team. It’s easy to do the math here. If you subtract twenty-three from 2008, you get 1985. Mitt Romney created Bain Capital in 1984, and 1985 was the first tax return that reflected his new job. It’s obvious that Romney turned over every record that pertained to Bain Capital. Now, why did he do that? And why did McCain’s team ask him to do that?

Romney turned the records for Bain Capital over to McCain because he is ambitious and he wanted to be selected as McCain’s running mate, and he knew McCain would never consider him for the job if he didn’t provide the records that had been requested. McCain wanted the records from Bain Capital because he wanted to know whether Mitt Romney had any vulnerabilities that might embarrass him and potentially cost him the chance to win the election and become president.

Now, why should we the people not operate with these same assumptions? Shouldn’t we, like McCain, refuse to consider Romney’s candidacy if he won’t show us his records? And shouldn’t we, like McCain, be worried that he’ll embarrass us and our country if it turns out that he has things in his record that he had good reason to hide?

What makes John McCain more important than the voters? He looked at those twenty-three years of tax returns and thought Sarah Palin, a person he met once and barely knew, would be a better more responsible choice. If Romney won’t let us make up our own minds about his tax returns, maybe we should just defer to McCain’s judgment then. We’ll assume that Romney is worse than Palin.

And it’s not just that I want to hassle Romney or that I think every presidential candidate should release every tax record they’ve ever created. But Romney is obviously hiding something, so now I want to know what McCain apparently knew. I think all Americans should know at least as much as John McCain knows. Why is that unreasonable?

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