By The Week's Editorial Staff | The Week – Fri, Jul 13, 2012
Romney caps off a bad week with a big fight over whether he lied about when he actually left
Bain Capital. Here's why such a small dispute matters so much
Mitt Romney's presidential campaign was
buffeted by news reports on Thursday — most prominently
from The Boston Globe — which
said that despite Romney's repeated insistence that he left private
equity firm Bain Capital in February 1999, he was actually listed in SEC
and Massachusetts legal filings as its "sole stockholder, chairman of
the board, chief executive officer, and president" until 2002, pulling
in an "executive" salary of at least $100,000 a year.
Team Romney points to a
report in Fortune, among other sources, to back up its assertion that Romney didn't actively manage Bain's investments after 1999, but even
Republicans are getting nervous about Romney's Bain baggage. Why does it matter if Romney was
running or just "running" Bain for three years, a decade ago? Here, five ways this new Bain flap could hurt Romney:
1. This makes Romney look dishonest
The big reason this Bain story matters is that it's "one more big lie for Romney,"
says Martin Longman at Booman Tribune.
Either he's "been lying about having no control of Bain's decisions in
1999-2002," or Bain has been lying to regulators and investors. Romney's
way of squaring that circle, giving "increasingly tortured explanations
of the definition of 'CEO,'" just makes him look "increasingly
weaselly,"
says Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. Politically, claiming that "he was only
technically CEO and isn't responsible for what happened during his
technical CEO-ship" looks like "a Mafia don taking the Fifth."
SEE MORE: Mitt Romney's foreign policy tour: Can he repeat Obama's '08 success?
2. And it ruins his big push to label Obama a liar
"The
Romney campaign has truly awful timing,"
says Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog.
Team Obama has been hitting Romney for weeks about Bain and the
outsourcing of U.S. jobs, and Romney picked Thursday morning — just as
The Boston Globe's
"bombshell" about Romney's Bain lies hit the stands — to punch back
hard with a TV "ad that effectively (and ironically) accuses the
president of being a big liar." It's hard to say if Romney's
counterpunch would have landed on a different day, but it certainly
didn't when questions about his own truthfulness dominated the political
media.
3. The whole Bain selling point takes another hit
The
crux of this fight is Romney's repeated insistence that he left Bain in
February 1999, and "there's no great mystery" about why,
says The Maddow Blog's Benen.
He's made his business experience his major selling point, and he
"doesn't want to be on the hook for a series of controversial Bain
investments, layoffs, and bankruptcies that Bain oversaw after" that
point. The problem with Romney's pushback is that "things are reaching
the point where the facts don't really matter,"
says Ginger Gibson at Politico.
"The Bain cloud now hanging over the former Massachusetts governor is
growing daily, and the Romney campaign still hasn't found a compelling
way to respond."
SEE MORE: The ObamaCare ruling: Is Mitt Romney caught in a tax trap?
4. Lying to the SEC could be a federal felony
FactCheck.org has generally taken Romney's side in this fight,
says David Edwards at The Raw Story,
but in defending Romney's contention that he can't be held responsible
for post-1999 Bain-linked bankruptcies and outsourcing, the
fact-checkers "may have accidentally revealed that the GOP candidate
committed a 'federal felony.'" It would amount to perjury if Romney had
wrongly certified on "federal financial disclosure forms that he left
active management of Bain Capital in February 1999,"
FactCheck.org said July 2. Obama campaign lawyer Robert Bauer and Romney adviser Matt McDonald offered, unsurprisingly,
opposing views Thursday on whether Romney might be in legal trouble.
5. It can also open Romney up to lawsuits
Whether or not
Romney could be charged with a federal felony, he might have opened
himself up to legal action from Bain investors, former SEC Commissioner
Roberta Karmel
tells The Boston Globe.
Bain told the SEC that Romney was CEO and sole shareholder, so "are you
telling me he owned the company but had no say in its investments?" It
wouldn't look that way to someone who "invested with Bain Capital
because they believed Mitt Romney was a great fund manager." This kind
of potential "misrepresentation to the investor... could be used in a
lawsuit against him."
SEE MORE: Mitt Romney raises $100 million in June: Should Obama be worried?
6. This is yet another reminder of Romney's wealth
If Team Romney wants to win this fight, the burden of proof is now on its side,
says Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast.
Even then, "this is a lose-lose for Romney." He's lost yet another day
of the campaign to talk about his vast wealth rather than Obama's
economic record, "and even the best case in defense of Romney must argue
that he got paid at least $100,000 a year for doing nothing." That will
have a lot of Americans wondering "how the rules they live by simply
don't apply to people with Romney's massive wealth."
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