“So, do you think Romney is lying?” Dave and I were sitting downstairs in his snug Vail condo. I had just ridden 8 hours over the Continental divide through a freezing thunderstorm, and my mind wasn’t working too smoothly.
“About what … his offshore accounts, or his departure from Bain Capital?”
“I think that Obama must have something, a snoking gun, or they wouldn’t be calling him either a liar or a felon.”
“So you mean about those SEC filings from 1999 through 2002, showing him to be the owner, sole shareholder, President, CEO and managing partner of Bain Capital during the time he was supposedly working full time to salvage the Salt Lake City Olympics?”
“Yeah, they wouldn’t be saying those things unless they could prove he was doing something sneaky.”
“Well, first of all, I don’t think Romney is sneaky. He’s Mormon … so he’s a Boy Scout.”
“I know, they all seem so superficial. I mean, there just seems to be no there there.”
” Actually, I do think there is a lot of depth to the Mormons I know. It’s just that what you see on the surface is the way they are all the way through. The Mormons I know have personalities just as complex as anyone else, it’s just that’s it seems to have been programmed into them rather than being constructed over the natural course of a lifetime.
But that’s beside the point. I think it is perfectly reasonable to consider that Romney actually was taking a leave of absence from Bain to focus full time on the Olympics. He’d done that before when he ran for Senate in 1994. When he left for SLC in ’99, he assumed he would come back after the Games. But in the Spring of ’02, it became obvious that Jane Swift was making of hash of the governorship in Mass., so he was asked to run against her in the primary. That’s when he decided to sever his ties with Bain, retroactive to 1999.”
“But what if there are minutes of Board meeting, or other documents showing that Romney was in on some of the outsourcing decisions that Bain made during that time? Wouldn’t that expose him as a slime bag? I can’t believe Obama would make those accusations without proof.”
“Come on, Dave, political campaigns aren’t about truth or falsehood. They’re not about policy direction. They’re surely not about facts and figures, reason or logic. Elections are about generating an emotion in the voter about the candidates. The emotion that Axelrod and Plouffe are trying to generate is: ‘Romney is too rich to be President.
All this stuff about his tax returns, his vulture capitalism, his multiple homes, his visits with rich donors – it’s to make him seem to be somebody with whom the average American can not identify. Someone with so much money that all he thinks about is how to preserve it. By firing people who work for him, shutting down their companies, parking his money out of the country to avoid taxes.
They don’t have to prove anything – they just have to continue with all this guilt by association. Remember, Romney is trying to run as the “Generic Opponent.” Not even the Generic Republican, just someone who (a) isn’t Obama and (b) is bland and palatable. By the way, that’s where is Mormonism works for him – he’s spent a lifetime learning how to be bland and palatable, so much so that it’s not a mask – it’s who he is.
So the Obama campaign is jumping into the breach and trying to color the black and white picture. Anytime people hear or read about Romney, they get the message the guy is loaded and doesn’t think about money the same way ‘we’ do. That he’s Too Rich To Be President.”