Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Romney between a rock and a hard place

Visual source: Newseum

Either Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president" of Bain Capital from 1999-2002, when all sorts of ugly outsourcing and vulture fund activities were taking place, or he was just listed as "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president" on the company's documents, which means he was simply a figurehead collecting cash generated by said ugly outsourcing and vulture fund activities.

There really isn't a viable way for Romney to spin the facts...even if we knew definitively what the facts were.

Jonathan Berstein at The Washington Post:

How vetted is Mitt Romney? [...] There were basically two serious candidates who fully committed to the race against Mitt Romney: Tim Pawlenty, who left early before really getting his act together, and Rick Perry, who started late and promptly imploded. Does anyone think that any other candidate had a serious opposition-research shop and the ability to exploit whatever was there? I sure don't. Rick Santorum barely had a campaign. Newt? Sure, he was supported by anti-Bain Super PAC ads, but I don't think he actually had much of a campaign, either. Herman Cain? Michele Bachmann? Ron Paul? Well, Paul did run some very effective attack ads (against Newt, if I recall correctly), but you didn't really need very sophisticated research to come up with Newt and Nancy on the couch.

Now, I don't want to make too much of this; Romney did fight for two contested nominations over two cycles, and that's something no matter what. The press, of course, has had about six years to dig in to him, and that's not counting the press in Massachusetts. And I'm not saying that Romney is a poor general-election candidate or that there are necessarily going to be any important revelations ahead. I think he's a generic Republican candidate, which is pretty good, really, and I have no idea whether the media (and the Obama campaign) will learn anything that makes him look worse than that. It's just that we usually have a process that can reassure his party that whatever's out there has probably been uncovered, and I'm not sure that's the case this time.

Joan Walsh at Salon on Romney's "self-inflicted wound":

Mitt Romney's campaign started Thursday with a rough ad calling President Obama a liar for his charges about Bain Capital outsourcing. It ended the day demanding Obama apologize for a campaign staffer who suggested Romney's confusing statements on when he left Bain might have involved a 'felony.' Oh, and for good measure? The campaign also demanded that the Boston Globe retract the story that led to Stephanie Cutter's 'felon' suggestion: It revealed that while Romney insists he left Bain in February 1999, SEC filings show the firm still listed him as CEO as late as 2002.

I'm not calling Romney a felon, but it seems like providing incorrect or misleading information to the SEC could be a serious problem, either for Romney or for Bain Capital. I admit, the actual details of when Romney left Bain and what role, if any, he continued to play after February 1999 remain murky. But it seems to me Romney made these timing questions an issue himself, by trying to insist that Bain's outsourcing adventures took place after he left the firm to run the Salt Lake City Olympics. By the way, the Romney campaign also demanded that the Washington Post retract its original story about Bain's investments in outsourcing. The Post refused, and the Globe will too. Both papers had solid documentation for their stories.

The real problem is that Romney made his qualifications as a business leader his main calling card as a presidential candidate ' and immediately began backpedaling away from his career. First he described himself as a 'job creator,' but when his own GOP rivals began digging up stories about Bain's role in destroying jobs, he stopped making that claim, while accusing his rivals of demonizing capitalism. Then, when the Obama campaign, and later the Washington Post, began pointing to Bain's investments in firms that sent jobs overseas, and even firms that specialized in helping other firms send jobs overseas, he insisted he was being blamed for investments and/or decisions made after he left Bain ' setting off this search for proof of when he actually left the firm. Before the Boston Globe, both David Corn at Mother Jones and Talking Points Memo also found documents listing Romney as still involved at Bain later than he claimed.

The Week breaks down six ways Romney's "big lie" hurts him:

6. This is yet another reminder of Romney's wealth
If Team Romney wants to win this fight, the burden of proof is now on its side, says Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast. Even then, "this is a lose-lose for Romney." He's lost yet another day of the campaign to talk about his vast wealth rather than Obama's economic record, "and even the best case in defense of Romney must argue that he got paid at least $100,000 a year for doing nothing." That will have a lot of Americans wondering "how the rules they live by simply don't apply to people with Romney's massive wealth."

Michael Scherer at TIME:

Mitt Romney wants you to know that both of these things are true: 1. He was the 'controlling person' in a number of Bain Capital investments between 1999 and 2002, when he left to work on the Salt Lake City Olympics. 2. He had no actual personal control over those investments during that time.

This is not a particularly comfortable position for a presidential candidate to be in, though it is also not exactly an unusual one for Romney, who has, among other things, taken credit for both Obama's bailout of Detroit and for opposing Obama's bailout of Detroit.

Also at TIME, Michael Grunwald writes about how Bain was fatal to Romney's 1994 Senate bid:

My only credential for discussing whether Bain will hurt Romney in 2012 is that I lived in Massachusetts in 1994, when he was running for Senate against Ted Kennedy. I was just a kid covering night cops in Boston, paying virtually no attention to politics, but I do remember this: Bain KILLED Romney. [...]

When I mentioned this to my favorite Romney-watcher a few weeks ago'Swampland seems so lonely without you, David'he reminded me that Massachusetts isn't America. But South Carolina isn't America, either, and Bain attacks didn't seem to hurt Newt Gingrich there. Put aside the questions about outsourcing and bailouts and SEC documents; Bain is a reminder that Mitt Romney was a CEO, a boss, a Wall Street suit, a rich guy who fires people. This was Mike Huckabee's insight; Romney reminds people of the guy who laid them off. He could still beat Obama'Kennedy wasn't presiding over 8 percent unemployment'but he's going to have to figure out a way around his Bain problem.

As I said, I'm not an expert in political tactics, and it may not be particularly original to point out that Bain is toxic for Romney. But Bain is toxic for Romney, and the idea that Beltway reporters thought President Obama's campaign should drop the issue because it hurt Cory Booker's feelings is a reminder that the experts in political tactics are not really experts in political tactics either.

Howard Fineman at The Huffington Post:

It takes perverse talent to turn a two-day mini-story into a major three-week distraction. But that is precisely what Mitt Romney's campaign has done with a June 21 story in the Washington Post.