Oh -- yes. Now it all makes sense.
I've had a weird reaction to Mitt Romney for several months now. I'm not alone. I know that lots of people around here have had the same sense -- that there was something deeply wrong with Mitt Romney's public persona and his candidacy.
We've talked about it from a bunch of different angles:
Mitt the spoiled rich kid.
Mitt the bully.
Mitt the sociopath.
Well, yes. And, to be fair, we said the same things about George W. Bush when, for example, it was revealed that he had used his father's connections to evade service requirements in the Vietnam era.
And when we learned that as a child, he liked to capture, torture and kill kittens.
These are character issues -- and fairly serious ones. I'm glad I've been given the opportunity to learn a bit more about Mr. Romney as these stories were reported.
But the whole BAIN DISASTER in the Romney campaign really nails it down for me.
This is what is making me uneasy:
We don't know who Mitt Romney is ... and he can't or won't account for what he was doing for several recent years of his life.
Here's what drove it home for me, from Armando's top recommended diary post today:
[Washington Post columnist] Kessler wrote "The years 1999-2002 are a gray period in Romney’s life."
Um. EX-CUH-USE-ME?
It shocks me to realize that, yes, one of our major parties is putting up a candidate who won't tell the press after repeated enquiry, exactly what his professional roles were during a three year period, what his responsibilities were, both public and private, and how he was compensated.
He won't release his tax records, either.
I'm pretty sure that it's because he paid little or no taxes on incredibly high incomes and that he thinks it will make him look bad.
It will.
I'm starting to get it:
Mitt Romney is hiding information from the public that we would otherwise use to properly vet him for this role. He doesn't want us to know who he is, what he has done, and what he was paid for it -- because he thinks that information will damage his chances in the election.
So. We have "gray areas of his life." We have secrecy. We have a willful disregard for standards of disclosure that all other legitimate candidates for president have followed in recent decades. We might have had several incidents where Romney broke the law filing SEC documents, or lied to the public about his roles at Bain.
Contrast this to Barack Obama who, shortly after committing himself to government service, began to construct written biographies of himself for publication documenting his personal and professional history, recording achievements and disclosing failures, and putting his family struggles out there as a matter of public record.
In comparison, Mitt Romney looks like a rich guy with some dancing horses who won't let us know enough about who he is and what he does -- certainly not enough to make an informed decision about him.
Though I'm sort of getting the picture.