There’s been a bit of a blowup over presumptive Republican presidential nominee Willard Mitt Romney’s refusal to disclose more than the last two years of tax returns which, he points out, is more than is required by law. Because what we really want in a president is somehow who does just above the bare minimum. Anyway, it led to this meme, which I admit made me LOL quite a bit:
Charles Pierce hit on a very important point in Esquire, which may explain the whole debacle:
There is nothing in those tax returns that is in any way illegal. Certainly, there is within them probably a fairly clear illustration about how our tax code — and, indeed, our entire economic system — has been gamed to benefit the folks in Romney’s economic stratum, but that’s hardly a secret anymore. As Paul Krugman said in this morning’s New York Times, that’s what this whole election is going to be about, whether the two candidates like it or not. And I don’t think Romney’s trying to keep secret how much money he’s kicked back to his church, either. Anybody who’s bothered by that is bothered on theological and cultural grounds. All recent evidence to the contrary, Romney’s people, and Romney himself, are not stupid. They know all this as well as anyone else does. He is not fighting the release of these returns to keep us from finding out the dark secrets about how stupid-wealthy he and his family are. He is fighting the release of these returns because he doesn’t think he should have to release them.
It is helpful always to remind yourself that, in the mind of Willard Romney, there are only two kinds of people — himself and his family, and The Help. Throughout his career, and especially throughout his brief political career, Romney has treated The Help with a kind of lordly disdain. It was there when he swooped down from snowy Olympus and shoved an incumbent Republican governor named Jane Swift under a train. It was there in the general election in 2002, when he glibly pushed aside the Democratic candidate, state treasurer Shannon O’Brien, who raised almost all the same issues against Romney that the president and his people are belaboring him with today. The only time it didn’t work was in his race against Senator Edward Kennedy, when Romney found himself up against a candidate with so much money that he couldn’t outspend him, and so much historical gravitas that he couldn’t ignore him.
The Help has no right to go pawing through the family books, giggling at the obvious loopholes and tax dodges, running amok through all the tax shelters, and probably getting their chocolate-y fingerprints all over the pages of the Romney family ledger. And, certainly, those members of The Help in the employ of the president of the United States, who is also part of The Help, have no right to use the nearly comically ostentatious wealth of the Romney as some sort of scrimey political weapon. He does not have to answer to The Help. I mean, jeepers, he’s running for office.
This isn’t stubbornness. That’s often an acquired trait. What this is, fundamentally, is contempt. Contempt for the process, and contempt for the people who make their living in that process, and contempt for the people whose lives depend on that process. There are rules for The Help with which Willard Romney never has had to abide, and he has no intention of starting now. My dear young fellow, this simply is not done.
Because I’m lazy, and because there isn’t much I can add on the silliness of this whole issue, here are some blogs I would have linked to had I written out a full post on this:
