Here is reason number one thousand and forty for releasing your tax returns if you’re running for President of the United States: if you don’t, someone will try to reverse engineer them, using whatever scraps of paper are available, until they have built some sort of structure that may, in your mind, look like a clumsy papier-mâché version of your well-ordered financial house—and you will have no cause to complain; they will be performing a public service. This is the case with the nine hundred and fifty pages related to Romney’s Bain holdings, that Gawker, to its credit, released today. Does the Romney campaign think that this is unfair and partial and out of context? Give us the context. Do financial professionals and industry journalists think that there is not much here to see here (Fortune called the papers “worthless”)—that it may sound strange to invest in dozens of funds with opaque names and offices in the Cayman Islands, for a retirement package to behave like a perpetual-motion money-generating machine, or for Romney, of all people, to be financially tied to the National Enquirer, but that that’s just how money management, and our tax code, work at a certain level? (Gawker managed to make a joke about its own ties to the Caymans.) Good to know; better to know how the man who wants a job managing not just his own money but our entire economy understands what the meaning of normal is, or should be, when it comes to taxes and financial responsibility and our shared burdens.
When a candidate runs for office, it can be a moment not only for learning about his policies but about another perspective on the country and the opportunities it offers and where different choices can lead. The campaign itself is a schoolroom—in this case, perhaps, for learning about the tax code. As I’ve written before, what’s most disturbing about the Romney family’s attitude toward releasing the returns is that neither Mitt nor Ann (who has said very clearly that, as far as she is concerned, nothing more will be released ), seem to trust the American people to understand their taxes. Ann Romney talked about more releases just providing more “ammunition.” Perhaps she and her husband will see the Gawker documents as a loose gun, with no safety—the sort of thing that needs to be kept out of the hands of the financially immature. That, though, is the complaint of someone looking for a quiet private life—it’s not worthy of a candidate for President.
And this is not some obscure and arcane demand being made of them. We only have one full year of Romney’s tax returns plus the estimate of another (along with older incomplete records from his days as governor and miscellaneous federal disclosures). His stubbornness on this point does not bode well for the standard of transparency a Romney Administration would hold itself to in other areas—the role of business interests, but also basic matters of national security and war and peace. He has to trust the public—doesn’t he?
We’ll see, in the next days, whether there is anything damaging in the documents—plenty of people are looking at them now, including our writers—we’ll have more on this. One question is whether the Romneys will now, finally, realize the value of straightforwardness on this most basic point; if they do, we may have good cause to thank Gawker. Mitt Romney might, too—whether he knows it now or not.
See our full coverage of the campaign season at The Political Scene.
Photograph by Evan Vucci/AP.
