Sex, Lies, and Money

The subject on which Bill Clinton kept secrets and lied was sex. The subject on which Mitt Romney keeps secrets and lies is money.

There is, first of all, the matter of Romney withholding all his past tax returns but one. Then, in recent days, there is the matter of the degree of responsibility he did or didn’t hold for actions by Bain Capital, which he headed (a fair characterization of a man who was simultaneously Chairman, CEO, and President), between February 1999 and March 2002, when he declared his candidacy for the governorship of Massachusetts. As of this morning, he’s still begging questions from the Boston Globe, including this:

The firm did not respond to Globe questions about why SEC filings show Romney in control of five Bain Capital business partnerships that were formed in January 2002 — long after Romney claims to have left.

Romney’s spokespeople have denied that he had any management role in the company during the time he was involved with the [Olympic] games, despite maintaining legal and financial connections to Bain. They say the title listed in SEC filings was an in-name-only position Romney maintained while on leave.

The former Massachusetts governor, however, has previously acknowledged that he remained active in the corporate arena while heading the Salt Lake City games. In a June 17, 2002, appearance before the Massachusetts State Law Ballot Commission, Romney said that during his Utah-based Olympics service, there were “were a number of social trips and business trips that brought me back to Massachusetts, board meetings, Thanksgiving and so forth.”

How much time Romney did or didn’t spend in Massachusetts in the years prior to 2002 became an issue when he ran for governor due to questions about his state residency.

Romney testified about his residency after Democrats challenged his eligibility to run in Massachusetts after having been based out of state. The election panel signed off on his candidacy.

Romney didn’t mention Bain Capital in his testimony as one of the companies with which he continued to work while leading the Olympic committee. Asked whether Romney attended any meetings or participated in any phone calls for Bain — as he did for other firms — a Romney spokeswoman reiterated that the candidate didn’t have an “active role” in the company during that time.

Lies and fudges are less interesting than the reasons for them. At one level, Salon’s Steve Kornacki proposes an explanation for Romney’s shifting story:

...it makes all the sense in the world that he would have held on to his leadership titles at Bain and planned to return after the games. For most of the time he was in Utah, politics was not a realistic option for Romney’s immediate post-Olympic career. And because of this, it makes all the sense in the world that Romney would have remained apprised of Bain’s activities while in Utah and maintained some level of engagement, even if he wasn’t directly involved in the company’s day-to-day activities. That’s pretty much what Romney told the ballot commission in June ’02, when he termed his ’99 departure a leave of absence and explained that during his Salt Lake years he’d come back to the state for “a number of social trips and business trips that brought me back to Massachusetts, board meetings, Thanksgiving and so forth.”

Romney didn’t start pushing the idea that he’d severed all ties with Bain in ’99 until late in the ’02 campaign, when Democrats played up Bain’s closure of a Kansas City steel plant, a move that cost 700 workers their jobs.

But there’s a far deeper question of what is at stake here. It has to do with the sobriety, realism, and morality that are at stake in this year’s election. For after all, what’s the difference between what Bill Clinton and Mitt Romney did? Extramarital sex had nothing to do with Bill Clinton’s policies or administrative methods for governing the United States. As for Romney, the biases of tax law, and the loopholes of which he availed himself, and the locations where he and others among the plutocracy place their money, have everything to do with pressing issues before the United States. The question of who is responsible has everything to do with the financial cave-in that brought down the global economy.

But in one way, Romney’s defenders are right. The question of whether Romney knew about specific job offshoring in 1999-2002 isn’t very important. What’s important about Romney’s business experience is whether he ran a private equity company that was committed to maximizing bottom lines, not creating jobs. Romney did that very handily, by all reports. Bill Clinton didn’t run for president as an avatar of personal morality. Romney is running for president on his skills as a business manager. What Romney’s supporters don’t want to face is that, when testifying to the degree to which he controlled Bain, Romney cut corners. Is this amazing? The meritocrats who superintend the everyday workings of the plutocracy—not least filling out their legal paperwork—consist of professional corner-cutters. When liberals cut these sorts of corners, the house moralists call it “situation ethics,” but never mind.

The more inconvenient facts turn up, the deeper Romney falls victim to the Karl Rove maxim: “When you’re explaining, you’re losing.” Money is a dirtier little secret than it used to be.