Mitt Romney
continues to refuse to release his past tax returns, while insisting that
there’s “nothing hidden in them.”
It’s an
untenable position, since it begs the obvious question, “If there’s nothing
hidden, why not release them?”
The answer,
of course, is that the returns will likely show the enormous amount of money he
makes, how he makes it and how he uses sophisticated techniques to avoid paying
taxes. We won’t see anything illegal in
Romney’s returns, but we will probably see how much he still earns from Bain
and be able to connect some of those earnings in certain years to layoffs of
companies that Bain bought and sold. It will also probably show a number of tax
avoidance techniques using loopholes in the current tax laws, such as “carried
interest” and tax shelters in foreign lands. The returns
will reinforce the notion that Romney is a fat-cat one-percenter who should be
paying more in taxes.
The returns
will be bad news for the Romney campaign, which is precisely why he should have
released them already.
Get the bad news out early and all
at once. That’s one
of the truisms that I have learned from 25 years of developing and implementing
crisis communications plans for companies in many industries and of many sizes,
including three of the largest chapter 11 bankruptcies in history. Letting the bad news fester can only lead to
three things, all bad for the company or individual:
1. The bad news stays in front of the
pubic longer.
2. The bad news leaks out slowly, so
what was just one story becomes many stories over time.
3. When the bad news breaks, it will be
bigger than it would have otherwise been, because added to the news is the fact
of the cover-up. Take, for example, Penn
State’s child abuse scandal.
Once bad
news is out there, the company or individual can address it, either by telling
the world why it won’t happen again or by asserting its side of the story. The second approach would be the one for
Romney to take. He is already advocating the positions that enable him to make
and keep so much money. The fact that he does what he says is okay shouldn’t
surprise anyone. But by refusing to release the returns, the Romney campaign
keeps the issue in the news and gives the Obama campaign a symbolic cudgel with
which to beat Romney again and again…and again.
I can
understand Romney’s reluctance to release the returns before he had sewed up
the nomination, given the complicated tango he danced with the extreme
right-wing of the Republican Party, AKA the Tea Party.
But if Mitt
had asked me, I would have made a strong recommendation to release the returns
as soon as he had a majority of convention delegates in hand. Once out, he
could have responded to the criticism by saying, "There’s nothing illegal in
the returns, so it’s a closed matter. Let’s move on.”
Romney
would still have to defend his economic positions, he would still be a poster
child for the fat cats and he would still be open to charges that his only
concerns are for the wealthy and that he doesn’t care about anyone else. But he’ll have to defend those accusations no
matter what. With the returns out, he
could spend his time trying to explain to the American people why he thinks his
tax policies work to the benefit of everyone (FYI, they don’t.)
By not
releasing the returns, he reinforces the idea that something nefarious is going
on. He turns a simple matter into a cover-up. And that’s much worse than
admitting what everyone knows already: that like other wealthy people, he makes
a lot of money and knows how to use existing tax laws to minimize his tax
burden.