Mitt Romney's taxing baggage

Mitt's tax avoidance embodies unfairness in a moment when economic justice is a driving issue. And to boot, he comes off as out of touch, unconnected, and unconcerned

If Mitt Romney wins South Carolina after Monday's debate performance, then he really is unstoppable. And that's the probable outcome unless, after Rick Perry's departure from the race Thursday, there's an unlikely last-days coalescence of the religious right around the pyrotechnic Newt Gingrich, who as a nominee would prove to be a pyromaniac, reducing the GOP's White House hopes — and perhaps its House majority — to a handful of ashes. Certainly, Rick Santorum seems less likely than Newt to be the ordinand of the religious right in Gingrich's native South.

So the parade of primogeniture in the GOP marches on toward the nomination of another next in line, a younger redo of John McCain, less authentic and even readier to dispense with his own past convictions. But as he enters the general election contest, Romney will carry with him the disadvantage his super-PAC ascribed to Gingrich in attack ads in Iowa. It's Romney who has "a lot of baggage" — not just his shape-shifting, but negatives even more powerful — accumulated in his career as a takeover artist, but awkwardly augmented day after day on the campaign trail. 

Romney has to answer not just for his insensitivity and his income taxes, but for the sometimes brutal way in which he made his money in the first place.

In the first South Carolina debate, the candidate of the 1 percent biffed and farbled more than 180 words to respond to a simple question about releasing his tax returns. Maybe in April — "time will tell." By the next morning, he felt compelled to give in, adding that on millions in income he pays "probably closer to 15 percent," far below the rate for middle-class taxpayers. And, of course, since he is, as he klutzed to a campaign audience, "unemployed" himself — that is, living off coupon-clipping and a tax gimmick called carried interest — he's not burdened with payroll taxes either.

It's a good bet that the April disclosure will show that "closer to 15 percent" means less than 15 percent. And it's a better bet that Romney will release only his 2011 return — which can still be re-engineered to reduce its political toxicity. There should be — and will be — a demand to see returns dating back, for example, to 2002. That's the standard President Obama has set. How do we know if in some of those years, Romney paid closer to nothing than to 15 percent?

His baggage is not his wealth. People knew the Roosevelts and the Kennedys were rich, but believed they genuinely cared about hard working and out-of-work Americans — and were fighting to make the system fairer. Romney's tax avoidance doesn't just embody unfairness in a moment when economic justice has emerged as a driving issue; he proves again and again that he's out of touch, unconnected, unconcerned. Comfortably unemployed, he sounds blithely willing to make others join the less privileged ranks of that cohort: "I like to be able to fire people who provide services to me." The context — he claims he was talking about health insurance companies — doesn't excuse the content since the actual danger is that the companies will fire people when they get sick, or for any other reason, and not the other way around. In any event, the explanation can never catch up with the tongue-tripping. Just ask John Kerry whose "I voted for it before I voted against it" was an unfortunately pithy expression of a position that was in fact sensible and defensible: He favored supplemental appropriations during the Iraq War, but thought they ought to be paid for by repealing a portion of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.