Obama surrogates keep hammering Romney business record, ties to Bain Capital

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON — The political uproar over Mitt Romney’s history as a businessman opened the campaign week Sunday as key advisers to the Republican candidate and President Barack Obama each hammered away at the issue that is consuming the race for the White House.

Romney continues to struggle with charges that he remained in control of Bain Capital, the private equity firm he co-founded and the source of his massive fortune, well beyond when he contends he left the company in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympic Games.

What’s more his campaign is encumbered with his failure to explain accounts he maintained overseas — in Switzerland, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

Romney said again in five television interviews on Friday that he had no intention of releasing any more federal income tax returns, a fact that is fueling the Obama campaign’s message that the former governor of Massachusetts has not been transparent about his financial history.

Romney has released his 2010 return and a partial estimate for the 2011 tax year. Past presidential candidates have produce far more tax records, dating back to the 1968 run by Romney’s father, George, who set a precedent by releasing 12 years of tax records.

The 2012 race for the White House looks to be one of the closest in history and hinges, at this point, on which candidate can convince voters they are best suited to fix the stagnant U.S. economy.

The Obama campaign was refusing to let the Bain matter drop, keeping up the drumbeat that companies that Bain invested in sent jobs overseas — the so-called “outsourcing” of jobs needed by Americans at a time of deep economic troubles at home. U.S. unemployment remains at 8.2 per cent and the economy is the top issue for voters who will choose between Obama and Romney in 3 1/2 months.

Senior Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod said on CNN that he was not saying that Romney has “done anything illegal.” Instead, he said Romney has “taken advantage of every single conceivable tax shelter and loophole that we can see.”

He was trying to moderate remarks by Obama deputy campaign director Stephanie Cutter who said Romney’s having kept his name on company documents filed with the Securities and Exchange commission after 1999 could be a felony crime.

“She said,” Axelrod said, “if he was, in fact, not the chief executive, the president, the sole shareholder, and chairman of the company at the time and that’s what was filed, that would be a felony. She didn’t say he’s a felon.”

The issue of when Romney actually left Bain is relevant because of questions raised about the behaviour of the firm is the years after 1999 when the Obama administration contends it shut down some companies resulting in job lossesand engaged in moving jobs overseas to low-wage countries such as China and India.

Romney insisted in the Friday television interviews that he was no longer involved with Bain after he left in early 1999 for the job running the Olympics. His surrogates say that Romney’s departure was so sudden and unexpected that he took a leave of absence as Bain chairman, president, chief executive and sole shareholder to allow the company time to reorganize and choose new leadership.

That has become important because Bain filings with the SEC carried Romney’s name as holder of those positions well beyond his claimed 1999 departure.

“He was not involved in the management. He was not involved in the day-to-day decisions, and wouldn’t have had time,” top Romney adviser Ed Gillespie told CNN. He was explaining the period between 1999 and Romney’s subsequent retroactive retirement about two years later.

Romney contends Obama is focused on untruths about his involvement with Bain to distract voters from his failure to guide the U.S. economy to a robust recovery from the 2007-2009 Great Recession.

The Obama camp responds that Romney is basing his campaign on the claim that he is the best candidate to handle the economy because of his success as a businessman. It points, they say, to the questions about Romney’s business record and activities. That in turn raises questions about how he would handle policy that helps stop the economic slide of middle-class Americans.

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13:13ET 15-07-12