Romney Tries To Fight Back--Sort of

++Just for balance ,since the Romney campaign may announce their vice president to change the topic, here are the top three on the short list--Senator Robert Portman from Ohio, Former Governor Tim Pawlenty and Governor Bobby Jindal.


++John Sununu of New Hampshire , a Romney surrogate, charged that Obama was a pot-smoking socialist from Hawaii who never learned how Americans did business and he should learn how to be an American.


++This echoed Rush Limbaugh who yesterday said that Obama hates America.


++Yesterday, Mitt Romney told Fox News that President Obama could use his tax returns against him and that's why he didn't release them. Romney now says that John Kerry's wife Teresa Heinz didn't release her tax returns in 2004, prompting one wag to quip that "Is Romney running for First Lady?" In fact after much persuasion, Mrs. Kerry did release two years of her tax returns and John Kerry had already disclosed twenty years.


++Chris Matthews on Hardball yesterday asked whether Romney was a tax cheat. 


++Abby Huntsman , Jon's daughter, penned an op-ed for Huffington Post that said Romney would rather bow out of the race than release his taxes. A little rivalry here with Jon, who always seemed to be about to unleash a bomb on Romney for his overseas investments.


++Romney had to pull his ad with Barack Obama singing the Al Green tune because of copyright infringement. The ad was his counter to the Obama ad "Firms", which won acclaim. The difference was that Romney did not introduce the ad "I approve this ad" and it went after Obama for "crony capitalism", only opening Romney to charges that he had not revealed the identity of his bundlers for the campaign.


++President Obama's ad hit over 1,000,000 on the internet and he led off today with "Makes You Wonder", attacking Romney on what he is hiding by not releasing his taxes.


++A poll this morning showed that 56% of Americans want Romney to release his taxes for the past 12 years.


++Even David Gergen, who it turns out had been paid by Bain, urged Romney to release his taxes.


++Mark Halperin writing in Time said that "Republicans would be even more nervous if they knew what Chicago (Obama's headquarters) was still, patiently , sitting on."


++Bloomberg followed up their article on 35 questions Romney must answer to put the Bain story to rest with a piece by William Cohen who raises the issue of the mysterious IRA Romney has that amassed between $21 million and $102 million during 15 years at Bain.


++The Dallas Morning News today blasted Romney of "foolishly swimming upstream against public opinion and common sense. Extensive disclosure of tax information is a rite of passage all candidates accept the moment they declare for the presidency."


++Both US News and Business Week said that Romney's responses to the questions about Bain were not good enough and US News said that Romney's asking for an apology just doesn't' work in our politics.


++People raised the issue of how can Romney hold up if confronted by a real crisis and the business press raised the "Wimp Factor."


++The flap has generated days of cartoons about Romney and even John Stewart and Steve Colbert devoted major segments on skewering the Republican.


++While they was a fuss over Ralph Lauren outsourcing the Olympic uniforms, Romney surrogates said Romney wouldn't comment because he was a patriot. But only hours later, the story broke that he outsourced the Olympic uniforms in 2002 to Burma, where the they were made by slave labor and women claimed they were raped.


++Hitting the campaign trail in Ohio yesterday, President Obama hit Romney on his tax plan and got off a good line that Romney's plan would create 800,000 .. but overseas. The campaign put out a graphic showing what countries would get the most jobs from Romney's plan to give tax benefits to companies who outsourced jobs. 


++Steven Schmidt, who was John McCain's campaign manager, tried to stop the rumor that Romney's tax returns led to Sarah Palin being chosen Vice President. Schmidt admitted he had not seen the returns but the McCain campaign at that point was sensitive to Cindy McCain having 15 homes and such wealth that Romney was ruled out. However, people are demanding that Culverhouse who vetted the vice presidents talk about the tax returns he saw.


++On the web there has been a big document dump as people are again releasing all the opposition research the McCain people did on Romney.


++GOP operatives are trying to put a unique spin on recent events saying that President Obama is spending so much money now he will be in a hole come the fall. That this attack on Romney now will basically exhaust his ammunition. However, the Obama campaign says not. In fact, there are a serious of hits they are planning. The main effect is to portray Romney as the personification of everything that was wrong with our economy when it collapsed in 2008.