Thread: 2012 Hopefuls

Originally Posted by Jolie Rouge

And he'll show you his:

1) Un-doctored Birth Certificate!

2) College transcripts!

3) Law degree!

4) Un-doctored Draft notice!

5) And un-doctored Social Security card, and what state it's registered in!

When President Obama unseals his records, he can be justified in asking Mitt Romney to do the same. Also, when he explains how he got enough money to travel all over Europe and buy a million-dollar home on a neighborhood organizer's income!

It is somewhat amazing that Obama is campaigning to push Mitt Romney to voluntarily release more tax filings and accusing him of a potential felony over when exactly he left Bain...

Don’t release your tax records, Mitt
July 16, 2012 by Libby Sternberg

Count me among those frustrated by the anti-Romney Bain attacks, now in their umpteenth day dominating the political news cycle. Every day that Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, has to spend talking about precisely when he left Bain Capital or why he won’t release a gajillion years of tax records is a day lost from making the case for why President Obama has failed this country and needs to be replaced. Romney should be talking about how he’ll do a better job in the Oval Office than its current feckless occupant.

At Obama headquarters, they are surely clinking champagne glasses watching Romney and his surrogates stammer and sputter. Meanwhile, the Romney campaign surely knew it would be like this– the president is a “brass knuckled brawler.” http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives...tting-brawler/

Do not count me among those, however, who believe Mitt Romney should cave and release eight to ten years of tax records. To what end? We know the guy’s rich. And rich guys probably take advantage of every tax deduction and loophole their accountants advise them to use. Just ask tax-me-more-oh-please-oh-please Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway company is still fighting the IRS over taxes.

No, if Romney does release more tax records, expect more of the same from the past week. I do not believe for one second that the issue would go away quickly. The Obama camp would probably find a trove of ad material in the records, and they would be discussed endlessly on cable news shows—the Obama campaign has a willing partner in the news media on stories such as this. http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brad-wi...ld-sink-romney

The Romney camp needs to get beyond the Bainers’ obsession with irrelevant details about his past and beyond those who want to shout to the world what we already know—the guy has money.

In the recent past, the Romney camp demonstrated smarts and feistiness that surprised skeptics (such as me) who wondered about his ability to stage a winning campaign. Now his staff needs to dig back and analyze how they successfully fended off previous irrelevant attacks.

For example, when liberals started to make an issue about Romney’s family dog (whose cage was strapped to the top of the station wagon for a road trip), the Romney camp used humor to put the issue in context. You wanna talk abuse of dogs, they seemed to be saying, well, bring it on (pointing out how the president admitted to actually, ugh, eating dog, in his travels).

That’s what they need to do now. Don’t explain. Don’t deflect. Demonstrate.

When the dog story appeared, the Romney team didn’t say then that Americans wanted to talk about jobs while the president wanted to talk about dogs. They demonstrated how desperate the Obama camp was when raising the dog issue by…talking about dogs.

Now they need to do the same by talking about records—Obama’s, not Romney’s. The Obama camp, aided and abetted by a herd-like media, is afire to have records released. The Romney camp could say: Fine. You don’t want to talk about jobs, you want to talk about records. Okay. Let’s talk about records. Release yours, and we’ll talk. Release your college transcripts—after all, weren’t you sold to the American people as one of the smartest guys in the room? Release Fast and Furious records. Release anything and everything related to those intelligence leaks. Release the details of the sweet deals green energy companies received, especially those that contributed to your campaign.

Release them all. Let them rain on newsrooms like confetti.

Don’t run away from the issue, in other words. Use it to your advantage. Talk about it, but talk about it your way to demonstrate how desperate the Obama campaign is to talk about anything but what’s important.

I would love to see the Romney camp use that as a drumbeat, relentlessly pounding the release-the-records chorus so loudly that it would drown out the Obama “Bainers” and their whine about tax records and Bain tenure. It would put Obama’s side of this discussion in context. He and his surrogates (including some in the media) want answers on Bain and taxes? The American people want answers on where their tax dollars went and why the White House can’t control leaks and its DOJ.

Which are the records we need to see most? Records that tell us what we already know—Romney was a businessman who accumulated a lot of treasure—or records that might shed light on how the current occupant of the White House has ineptly dealt with our blood and treasure?

http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives...-records-mitt/

comments

Here is a winning attack ad. “President Obama wants to kill off the elderly with death panels… ( Screen shot of Elderly sitting under hot lamps in chairs while a “Death panel writes on clipboards giving the thumbs down sign.) (Fade to Twenty somethings standing on unemployment lines and living in squalor in basements and garages)…while sacrificing our recent college graduates lives to ten years of unemployment in order to “Fundamentally transform America” into a European style Socialist nanny state! Ad narrator; ” Are your parents and grandparents expendable? are YOU expendable? Vote him out! Vote “Romney"

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Obama 'Won't Be Apologizing' for Bain Attacks on Romney
By Matthew Larotonda | ABC OTUS News – Sun, Jul 15, 2012.

Republicans continue to call on President Obama and his campaign to give an apology for questioning Mitt Romney's role at Bain Capital. They won't be getting one.

"No, we won't be apologizing," the president said in an interview aired today. "Sometimes these games are played during political campaigns. Understand what the issues are here: Mr Romney claims he's Mr. Fix-it for the economy because of his business experience, so I think voters entirely legitimately want to know what is exactly his business experience."

Speaking to NBC's Richmond, Va., affiliate station, WAVY-TV, Obama invoked a past White House occupant in an argument he has used for days on the campaign trail.

"Harry Truman said 'the buck stops with me,' and I think understandably people are going to be interested in are you in fact responsible for this company you say is one of your primary calling cards for your wanting to be President," he said.

On Thursday an Obama campaign manager upped the ante on Romney's final days at Bain Capital by suggesting the Republican candidate had either lied to the public or misrepresented "his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony," by saying he had left the company in 1999. Romney gave five network interviews to defend himself, stating the Obama campaign had gone "out of control."

That spokeswoman doubled down on the attack today by stating there was no point in "arguing the semantics" of whether he was officially active at the firm during the time.

"If you're signing an SEC document with your own signature that you're the president, C.E.O., chairman of the board and 100 percent owner of a company, in what world are you living in that you're not in charge?" Stephanie Cutter said on CBS.

On ABC's "This Week," former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel put it another way:

"As president of the United States you can't have a sign on your desk that says, 'Gone fishing,'" the Chicago mayor said.

Emanuel and Cutter had come to represent the Democratic side in the row at the heart of the issue: Whether Romney could be held responsible for layoffs and outsourcing at Bain properties after he supposedly left to manage the U.S. Olympic Committee.

On the other side of the table: Romney adviser Kevin Madden.

"The reason there is a document in 2002 that had his signature is, during that transition from 1999 to 2002 where there was transfer of ownership to the new partners of Bain, that there was a duty to sign those documents," Madden said. "Even a bipartisan commission indicated Governor Romney left Bain in 1999."

It is a fact that Romney remained at the company until at least 2002, according to SEC filings obtained by the Boston Globe. But some independent fact checking organizations have criticized the reporting of Romney's role at the time, stating there was no evidence to say he took part in any decision-making processes.

Republicans have seized on those articles, demanding an apology from the Obama campaign. Madden repeated the call, but Cutter maintained it was out of the question.

"Instead of whining about what the Obama campaign is saying, just put the facts out there and let people decide, rather than trying to hide them," she said.

Cutter and Emanuel both referenced Romney's refusal to release any tax returns dating before 2010, which would shed light onto the nature of overseas holdings the candidate possessed.

"You've learned in just one year about the Caymans, about the Bahamas, about Luxembourg, and about Switzerland, all where his tax and different accounts are," Emanuel said. "His tax - his tax filing looks more like the Olympic Village than it does like a middle-class family."

Madden said Romney had "gone above and beyond" financial disclosure laws required of candidates, releasing "hundreds and hundreds of pages of financial disclosures with the FEC."

On CNN, another Romney surrogate, Ed Gillepsie, said the candidate's departure for the Olympics was originally planned as a "leave of absence."

"He ended up not going back at all and retired retroactively to February of 1999 as a result," Gillepsie said.

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-wont-apo...-politics.html