The steady drip of new stories about Mitt Romney’s taxes and his role at Bain Capital may be the result of a cleverly timed-and-executed opposition research attack by the Obama campaign. Or it could be a result of the “crowdsourcing” efforts of political journalists across the country digging out the details of what they recognize as a good story. (Chances are it’s a combination of the two.)
Whatever the cause, the effect is unlikely to be good for Romney’s presidential aspirations. Here’s a small snapshot of what Romney’s up against:
- On Wednesday, The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim reported that even the one tax return Mitt Romney has released isn’t complete: “Romney released his 2010 tax return in January of this year, a document that first informed voters about the existence of his Swiss bank account and financial activities in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. But people who own foreign bank accounts are required to file a separate document with the IRS that provides additional details on such overseas bank holdings, and Romney has not released that form to the public.”<!–more–>
- Yesterday, Joseph Tanfani and his colleagues at The Los Angeles Times opened a new line of questions about Bain Capital and its initial reliance on foreign investors with shady backgrounds: “When Mitt Romney launched Bain Capital in 1984, he struggled at first to raise enough money for the untested venture…. So he and his partners tapped an eclectic roster of investors, raising more than a third of their first $37-million investment fund from wealthy foreigners. Most of the foreign investors’ money came through corporations registered in Panama, then known for tax advantages and unusual banking secrecy. Previously unreported details, documented in Massachusetts corporate filings and other public records, show that Bain Capital was enmeshed in the largely opaque world of international high finance from its very inception.”
- Now comes today’s Boston Globe with Beth Healy and Michael Kranish writing about heretofore unrevealed details of Romney’s participation in a Palm Beach, FL meeting that celebrated Bain Capital’s 15th anniversary… after Romney had left Bain in Feb. 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics: “The Palm Beach meeting, which has not been previously reported, demonstrates the duality of Romney’s role as he parted ways with Bain…. Interviews with a half-dozen of Romney’s former partners and associates, as well as public records, show that he was not merely an absentee owner during this period. He signed dozens of company documents, including filings with regulators on a vast array of Bain’s investment entities. And he drove the complex negotiations over his own large severance package, a deal that was critical to the firm’s future without him, according to his former associates.”
In his classic Watergate book, How The Good Guys Finally Won, Jimmy Breslin describes how John Doar—special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, former Justice Department civil rights attorney, and lifelong Republican—used the methods he and others developed to win civil rights cases in the still-segregated South to force Pres. Nixon from office. In those days when computers were rare, those methods required lots of typists (30 for Doar’s office alone) and lots of paper (1.5 million sheets “used to make up the notebooks of the members of the House Judiciary Committee”).
Breslin, an old courthouse reporter who’d covered many criminal trials, knew how devastating the slow accumulation of mounds of documentary evidence could be.
“Nixon could fly to San Clemente. He could have his lawyers protest and delay. He could ignore what was going on. He could fly to Moscow, to Tel Aviv, to Cairo. There would be sun and service—the President does not make a phone call by himself—and the days would become weeks and the weeks would become months. The public would tire of Watergate, the newspapers would begin to write of other things. The President would say it was over: let us go on to something else. And always the paper mounted and the files grew thicker and higher and the typists typed. The paper grew, the edges becoming sharper, sharper, sharper. Soon Richard Nixon would feel the pain as the paper began to cut his life away.”
Mitt Romney isn’t Richard Nixon; and Romney’s personal finances and business dealings aren’t the Watergate conspiracy. But this is the kind of story that just doesn’t go away. And the reason (or at least, a major reason) it doesn’t go away is because of the paper: the SEC filings that Romney signed as “President, CEO, managing director and sole stockholder” of Bain Capital, minutes of board meetings and official correspondence from and among Bain’s managers and owners, Romney’s (book-length) tax returns. As long as there’s more paper, there’s more to investigate, more questions to ask, more people to talk to, more stories to write.
The economy is so bad that Romney might get elected despite all that paper and all those stories that won’t go away (despite the Olympics, and the national conventions, and the monthly jobs reports). And the electorate is sufficiently polarized that he’s unlikely to suffer a sharp drop in the polls.
But if he does lose in November, chances are it will be because his campaign suffered death by a thousand cuts…paper cuts.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/