Something Wicked This Way Comes

++The Romney campaign has just significantly out raise the Obama camp, held a megamillion fund-raiser in the Hamptons with David Koch, and flew to Wyoming to have another fund-raiser with Dick Cheney. So they had the big "Mo".


++The Olympics were coming up. A chance to showcase Romney's Salt Lake City experience. The Romneys are flying to London for the Olympics. A mini-kerfluffle hits about Olympic uniforms being outsourced to China. Good opportunity for Willard to hit Obama. But then again it turns out that Romney outsourced the Olympic uniforms at the Salt Lake affair. So no political point. Then the trainer of Ann Romney's horse releases a statement that he has never before seen a horse doped up as much as the one going to the Olympics.


++Democrats in the Beltway had been critical of the Obama campaign running the Bain ads saying it was old news. But polling showed it wasn't and that they resonated with voters in swing states.


++And then this week we had the perfect storm. The SEC documents and the filings in Massachusetts showed that Romney hadn't retired from Bain to manage the Olympics but stayed on until 2001 and know today it comes out until 2002. He Retired Before he didn't.


++This sounds like small potatoes but it goes to the central defense of Romney's Bain existence his whole political life. From his run for governor through his last presidential campaign, he argued that he ended his career at Bain in 1999. This is for a simple reason. The company's most egregious outsourcing deals came after then and they faced government investigations for dubious financing. He has tried to escape this for the past decade.


++Ed Klein writing in Time remembers how the George H.W. Bush used the Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis and likens the Obama attack on Romney as having the same effect. In short, Obama is turning Romney into the Republican's Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, another flawed candidate from Massachusetts. The irony is that Romney has the maker of the Willie Horton ads as part of his campaign.


++Romney attacked Obama saying these ads on Bain are beneath a President and demanded an apology. The Obama campaign immediately used Romney's visual of asking for an apology and released an ad of all the personal attacks of Romney on President Obama. Asked today about whether he would apologize, President Obama said that since Romney's whole campaign is that he is "Mr. Fix-it for the economy", voters have the right to know his experience as a businessman. 


++The Wall Street Journal printed an article this week that Bain's job creation numbers were 1,300 and not the 100,000s Romney claimed during the primaries. Coupled with his poor record as a job creator as Governor, this spells hurt for a debate but not fatal.


++Following up the Vanity Fair piece on Romney's offshore accounts, various other publications picked up the fact that Romney was the sole owner of a Bermuda corporation. The response by Republicans was that Valerie Jarrett also banked in Bermuda. But the drip-drip-drip continued.


++Another bomb hit this week as legal analysts claimed that technically Romney's holdings are not in "blind trusts". This was his defense on the campaign trail that he didn't know where his money was and didn't know about the offshore accounts. His accounts are managed by his personal attorney, who was the one who liquidated the Swiss bank account because it was politically unsightly. Reporters were trying to find out how a "blind trust" could invest in Romney's son's business without him knowing.


++Republicans started complaining that Romney should get out ahead of these stories and the campaign complained they were "bedwetters". Pete Sessions said that Romney's finances were fair game in the election and called for him to be more open about it. His surrogates for the week were all over the map, some calling for him to release his tax returns, others saying he shouldn't. Both Haley Barbour and Michael Steele said that the Romneys should release the tax returns to minimize further damage. Romney himself told the public in his Friday interviews that two years of returns would be all they get.


++John Weaver, who was with the Jon Huntsman campaign, told the Romney people to stop "whining." Rahm Emmanuel this morning also said the same. Senator Dick Durbin said that "Romney was running from Bain like a scalded cat." Joe Trippi said that Romney was caught flat-footed and looked foolish in his resposes to the attacks.


++Political operatives from both sides said that Romney looks ridiculous,which is fatal in politics. They say he looks trapped and silly and that asking for an apology is losing. 


++Before Romney decided to plead for time on three major networks to answer all the charges, he had avoided talking to the major networks. What prompted the request was the rapid fire Obama ads that were devastating. 


++Film directors and political ad masters are calling Obama's "America the Beautiful " ad a classic masterpiece in political ads. Sound men are thrilled that so many bloggers picked up the audio techniques which make Romney sound like he is singing in closed factories and plants. It is an ad that lays out outsourcing, offshore accounts, and the tax questions in one short coherent message. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo called it brutal "Bitch Slap" politics from the Chicago school. Democratic bloggers were thrilled saying that Obama was now acting like a Republican using the attack techniques of Karl Rove. Other pundits likened the ad to LBJ's "Daisy Ad" used against Barry Goldwater.


++The damage done was palpable. You could see it when the Romney people floated the idea of Condi Rice as Vice President,through Matt Drudge. They wanted people to track the shiny object. When that didn't work,the Romney camp shot it down on their own. But rumors persisted that Romney could only save his presidential bid by choosing a different kind of Vice President, even though this makes little practical sense. Before his interviews on Friday, even Republicans were openly voicing concerns that Romney would have to frankly address these issues and shut the discussions down. What fueled part of the anxiety was the release of SEC documents that showed Romney as Chairman, CEO, and managing director of Bain in 2001 and the idea that Romney may have committed a felony. By the time of the interviews, people were expecting a Checkers Speech and Romney proclaiming "I am not a Crook". They would be disappointed.Democratic operative Paul Begala was so enthusiastic about Romney's predicament that he said,"Bain will never go away. We will run Bain ads even after the election."


++Romney's interviews proved to be a disappointment . He basically doubled-down on his statement he left in 1999 and that he would not release any more tax materials and the public would have to deal with it. What came across was an air of noblesse oblige that someone that rich doesn't have to explain himself. Both CNN and ABC gave him a softball interviews as if they have to keep the horse-race narrative going.


++But this Sunday, the talk shows were not so kind to Romney. Ed Gillespie, now an adviser to Romney,said that "Romney had resigned retroactively from Bain" and he decided to liken Romney's refusal to only release two years of tax returns to John Kerry. Gillespie only dug the pit deeper--John Kerry released twenty years of tax returns before the 2004 election. Bill Kristol called on Romney to release his taxes tomorrow. George Will bemoaned Romney's obtuseness to the current economic climate that does not hold bankers and finance people in high regard and that Romney's failure to deal with this in a transparent manner just fuels this resentment. Even Mark Halperin, a reliable GOP standby, earlier had tweeted that Romney had a lot of explaining to do. Karl Rove gave the Obama campaign unsolicited advice not to suggest Romney is a "felon".


++I think the week found Romney seriously wounded. He has abandoned any defense of his term as governor and rested his whole case on his experience as a businessman. We have not even gotten to a discussion on foreign policy and he can't get out of the weeds. It was Obama's week by far and he commands the language of the debate as we move forward.