Mitt Romney Is Not Having a Good Week

At least that is what it looks like from the radio and online news I see. Let’s start with his campaign not knowing how to settle on whether the penalty for not having health coverage built into Romneycare and Obamacare is a penalty or a tax. TPM compiles the confusion:

Then we have Vanity Fair’s investigation into Rmoney’s offshore financial dealings.

To give but one example, there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as “a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.” It could be that Sankaty is an old vehicle with little importance, but Romney appears to have treated it rather carefully. He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wife’s newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusetts’s governor. The director and president of this entity is R. Bradford Malt, the trustee of the blind trust and Romney’s personal lawyer. Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an “excepted investment fund” that would not need to be on his disclosure forms.

The AP followed up on this, going into some detail about how some of these have never been disclosed in required public documents. Meaning that he has been lying to people he wants to vote for him for quite awhile. And isn’t it interesting that the one thing he doesn’t have multiple positions on is his finances. He just won’t tell you about his worth or how he skips out on paying US taxes.

The mystery surrounding Sankaty reinforces Romney’s history of keeping a tight rein on his public dealings, already documented by his use of private email and computer purges as Massachusetts governor and his refusal to disclose his top fundraisers. The Bermuda company had almost no assets, according to Romney’s 2010 tax returns. But such partnership stakes could still provide significant income for years to come, said tax experts, who added that the lack of disclosure makes it impossible to know for certain.

Even Rupert Murdoch is getting in on the action, taking the candidate and his campaign to task for not knowing what they are doing:

Why make such an unforced error? Because it fits with Mr. Romney’s fear of being labeled a flip-flopper, as if that is worse than confusing voters about the tax and health-care issues. Mr. Romney favored the individual mandate as part of his reform in Massachusetts, and as we’ve said from the beginning of his candidacy his failure to admit that mistake makes him less able to carry the anti-ObamaCare case to voters.

And apparently they are having a bad enough week that they’ve sent Ann Romney out to tease the media about a female VP candidate. So they are hoping that the media will be distracted by this new bit of shiny horserace fodder instead of any of the accountability reporting that necessarily pulls aside the curtain on the stuff people like Romney want to keep hidden from us.