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WASHINGTON – Why Mitt Romney and his team still don’t have a prepared answer for the tax return question now borders on political malpractice. He’s been programmed within an inch of his life since the start, but on this subject he’s floundered into real trouble. However, from Forbes to Christian Science Monitor, few think it will matter.
Immediately, Mitt Romney has bigger problems, which Maggie Haberman encapsulates in one question in her report: So the question will be, how definitively does Romney or Gingrich win?
Romney’s tax return issue, however, is not going away. Even if he releases his 2011 returns, who doesn’t think they won’t be stacked for the election season? His dad released his financial information for several years, so that’s Mitt’s model. However, as one tax Pulitzer Prize winning tax guru, David Kay Johnson, on “Up with Chris Hayes” on MSNBC today (the best show on that network) said, what we really need to see is the years from 1984 – 1999 or so, when Romney was at Bain.
But as I wrote recently, let’s not pretend it’s only Romney and the Republicans who have the only challenge with their capitalistic appetites. Democrats have plenty of their own Romney-esque corporate Ken dolls, as Steve Rattner, Obama’s car czar, proved recently.
It’s never the facts surrounding the candidate that takes him or her out, it’s the emotions the voter feels toward the candidate that do him in. It wasn’t the quote about firing people that did it by itself, it’s that it represented how people already feel about Mitt Romney.
“I get speaker’s fees from time to time, but not very much.” – Mitt Romney
It’s the nervous laugh that came afterward, reminiscent of the Bret Baier interview, that sounds so sour, because $374,327 is anything but “not very much.”
Then comes the story I’ve been waiting to break, and it’s not that he tithes millions including stock options to the Mormon Church. It’s Mitt Romney stashing millions in the Cayman Islands. From ABC News:
But tax experts tell ABC News there are other reasons Romney may not want the public viewing his returns. As one of the wealthiest candidates to run for president in recent times, Romney has used a variety of techniques to help minimize the taxes on his estimated $250 million fortune. In addition to paying the lower tax rate on his investment income, Romney has as much as $8 million invested in at least 12 funds listed on a Cayman Islands registry. Another investment, which Romney reports as being worth between $5 million and $25 million, shows up on securities records as having been domiciled in the Caymans.
Official documents reviewed by ABC News show that Bain Capital, the private equity partnership Romney once ran, has set up some 138 secretive offshore funds in the Caymans.
Nothing Mitt Romney is doing is illegal and the Romney camp is also saying that his Cayman cash is taxed as if the funds were in the U.S., so anyone implying they’re tax havens are wrong. Then why the secrecy?
In an Occupy era, perception colors reality more harshly, with the GOP’s Cayman cash man representing all that ails our economic system.
Seen in an atmosphere of Santorum finally being declared the winner in Iowa, you also have Sarah Palin giving a nod to Gingrich, too. If the air around Cayman cash Mitt starts to erode his electability argument, always the weakest case for any candidate, the establishment will start to get very nervous, which it looks like they are already.
The wild card is women, a voting bloc that’s never warmed to Gingrich. Because though Mitt Romney is an uninspiring candidate, Newt Gingrich will never beat Barack Obama, because women won’t vote for him. I’m not even sure they will in South Carolina and I felt this way long before the Marianne Gingrich bombshell explode, though I had a very different view of that than most.
There is passion tied to Newt in South Carolina, but not Romney.
However, no matter the bad week Romney’s having, the one who really needs South Carolina is Newt Gingrich.
Mitt Romney’s hopes is that if he loses to Gingrich it’s not by very much.
Taylor Marsh is the author of the new book, The Hillary Effect – Politics, Sexism and the Destiny of Loss, which is now available in print on Amazon. Marsh is a veteran political analyst and commentator. She has been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her new media blog.