Obama Campaign Pimped Romney Exposé To Reporters Before Vanity Fair Did

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If the early bird gets the worm, then President Obama's reelection team had themselves a midnight feast early Tuesday morning, devouring Vanity Fair's damaging exposé of Mitt Romney's International Money of Mystery, and distributing the barely-digested spoils to reporters within minutes. Just after midnight, Team Obama sent a bullet-pointed memo to reporters, a full 9 hours before Vanity Fair's PR team got their pitch out to the press.

As Mediaite's Noah Rothman noted, the subject of former Massachusetts Gov. Romney's secretive financial dealings is a potent weakness in Romney's quest for the presidency, one which his opponents have been exploiting for quite some time.

Much of the damage, though, is self-inflicted. While Vanity Fair reporter Nicholas Shaxson's piece raises many questions about Romney's use of offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands, the true 'blindness' of his blind trust, and the ice-blooded business practices of Romney's Bain Capital, it is the Romney campaign's sparse responses to Shaxson that are truly deadly:

• One might perhaps accept an explanation by Romney's campaign spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, that the candidate's failure to include his Swiss account in earlier financial disclosures was merely a 'trivial inadvertent issue.'
• Andrea Saul said of these investments, 'Everything ' was reported correctly.'
• Andrea Saul retorts, 'Why should successful investments be criticized?'
• Romney's I.R.A. appears to have employed this lawful escape route, and his campaign has used language suggesting that it has. But that would mean the Romney camp's claim that Mitt's tax consequences of investing via the Cayman Islands is 'the very same' as it would have been had he invested directly at home is simply not true. (Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul says Romney 'gets the same benefit anyone would get from an I.R.A.,' but she did not respond to questions on whether his I.R.A. had used blockers or avoided taxes by investing via tax havens.)

And this, from Bain Capital:

When politics overwhelm fact, some will distort or cherry-pick our record and launch unfounded allegations and insinuations. The truth and the full record show that Bain Capital operates with high standards of integrity and excellence in compliance with all laws. Any suggestion to the contrary is baseless.

The best they can say, then, is that Romney didn't break the law, a boast which, notwithstanding their refusal to verify it, is faint reassurance to voters whom Romney expects to hand him the blank pages of that rulebook. At worst, it sounds like the protests of every movie mobster that he's a 'legitimate businessman.' It's not a good look for a presidential candidate. The Romney campaign may have been wiser not to comment at all. Saul's characterization of the Swiss bank account as a 'trivial inadvertent issue' was particularly unhelpful, evocative of Romney's insistence that $374,000 a year in speaking fees is 'not very much.'

The Vanity Fair report has become a buzzworthy topic on cable news, aided by the Obama campaign's rapid pitch to reporters, and the 4th of July holiday means a few extra days for the Washington media to talk about it. Noah wonders if Vanity Fair perhaps shot the Obama campaign's load early, but the dense, extensive exposé was never likely to drive public opinion on its own, especially among independents. It's a big bucket of political media chum, driving the political press into a feeding frenzy that will have at least one concrete benefit to the Obama campaign: It turns up the already-high pressure on Mitt Romney to release more of his tax returns (so far, the candidate has released his 2010 return, and an estimate for 2011).

Whether Romney ultimately releases them or not is almost irrelevant, because his refusal to do so (especially given that his father, George Romney, is the man who set the standard for such disclosures) will definitely hurt him with voters. Reports like this, though, might ultimately force Romney to do the right thing and release a dozen or so years of tax returns, on the theory that whatever is in them can't be as bad as what everyone is now imagining.

There has also been the suggestion that the Vanity Fair report is possibly the result of an Obama campaign oppo research dump, one that is superficially supported by the campaign's quick release of their memo, and by this casual, deeply buried attribution in the piece:

The Obama campaign provided a helpful world map pointing to the tax havens Bermuda, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands, where Romney and his family have assets, each with the tagline 'Value: not disclosed in tax returns.'

However, that very disclosure is, in fact, a certain indication that this wasn't a campaign oppo dump, because neither source nor reporter would be well-served by its inclusion.

No, the Obama campaign's quick response to the Vanity Fair article is more an indication of Team Obama 2.0's strength, which is its omnipresence and omnipotence at data collection and exploitation. While the Romney effort is opening up a wide fundraising advantage, the Obama campaign's unanswerable strength is that, like Savoir Faire, they are everywhere.

• Too bad Obama has such a sorry record that he can't be presidential and discuss why he should be reelected.
  He has to attack a good man who is actually capable of cleaning up Obama's Godawful mess and stopping his nefarious plans which could well spell doom for this planet.

• Obama hasn't been wasting time, though :

  Since it's been too hot to play golf, King Obama has been sitting around Camp David with his advisors. He asked them to submit some new excuses he can use about the lousy economy. Some of their ideas :

  Anna Wintour :
  Your Majesty could blame those dreadful knee socks pushed by Carson Pirie Scott back in 1976 and ' patriots' in fly-over country for wasting money on flags and not buying the latest fashions.

  Bill Maher :
  I fault that Bill Burton for actually cashing my million dollar check, causing it to bounce and costing me overdraft charges, which made my hooker and drug checks no good and ruining my street cred with the dirtbag community. Also that b***h t**t Sarah Palin for ruining my reputation and never returning my calls.

  Doris Kearns Goodwin :
  Mr. President. You could point to FDR interning Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Boston Red Sox hiring Bobby Valentine and ATMs, which have been around for forty years.  Also, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which disrupted the World Series that year. ©

• Willard Romney murdered a billion babies.

• I highly recommend reading the entire Vanity Fair article.  There's a good tip for Vulture Capitalists in there:
  1) break an employee pension contract, 
  2) add the savings to the company's bottom line, 
  3) borrow against the new rosy financial projections
  4) use the borrowed money to pay Bain and Goldman Sachs a dividend ten times greater than the money saved by breaking the employee pension fund contract

  Mitt Romney's business tactics would make Gordon Gekko blush with shame.

• Were you sleeping during the financial meltdown that happened because of the bad policies of Bush in both the financial market and the housing market. Obama and the Democrats have had to clean up that mess by stopping the country sliding into recession. The only thing Mitt is good at is flip flopping about every issue, all the time.