Bain Capital, tax returns continue to dog Romney. Can Obama make it stick?

The Sunday TV talk shows were filled with campaign surrogates for Mitt Romney and Barack Obama arguing about Romney's income taxes and his years running Bain Capital. It's meat for political junkies, but do average voters care?

By Brad Knickerbocker, Staff writer / July 15, 2012

Stephanie Cutter, deputy campaign manager for President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election, and Senior Advisor to the Romney Campaign Kevin Madden debate on CBS's "Face the Nation" in Washington Sunday.

Chris Usher/CBS/AP

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Mitt Romney has a lot going for him.

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He’s been able to out-raise (and therefore out-spend) the Obama re-election campaign. When the summer Olympic games start in London next week, you can be sure he’ll remind voters that he won a gold medal for saving the scandal-tainted 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. And the economy – that is, its refusal so far to show much sign of sustained recovery – may be bad for the country, but it’s good for a presidential challenger.

But as Sunday’s TV blabfests showed, Mr. Romney continues to be dogged by his business record and his personal wealth.

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First, his reluctance to do more than the minimum in releasing his income tax returns.

On ABC’s “This Week,” conservative columnist George Will says Romney is losing the issue “in a big way.”

“I do not know why, given that Mitt Romney knew the day that [John] McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for president again that he didn’t get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest,” Mr. Will said. “The cost of not releasing the returns are clear, therefore he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.”

Speaking on the same show, Republican strategist Matthew Dowd said, “Obviously something there, because if there was nothing there, he would say, ‘Have at it.’”

“Many of these politicians think, ‘I can do this. I can get away with this,’” Mr. Dowd added. “If he had 20 years of ‘great, clean, everything’s fine,’ it’d all be out there, but it’s arrogance.”

More Republicans piled on.

"He should release the tax returns tomorrow. It's crazy," William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said on "Fox News Sunday." "You gotta release six, eight, 10 years of back tax returns. Take the hit for a day or two."

At the National Governors Association meeting in Williamsburg, Va., over the weekend, Gov. Robert Bentley of Alabama called on Romney to release all the documents requested of him.

"If you have things to hide, then maybe you're doing things wrong," Gov. Bentley told the Associated Press. "I think you ought to be willing to release everything to the American people."